April is National Peotry Month: The Trees Stand Shining

The Trees Stand Shining is an anthology of poetry by  North American Indians. In the introduction it explains, "The poems in this book are really songs. There are different kinds: some are prayers, some short stories, some lullabies, and a few are war chants." The book also contains paintings by Robert Andrew Parker.

At the edge of the world
It is growing light.
The trees stand shining.
I like it.
It is growing light.
Papago

Butterfly, butterfly,butterfly, butterfly
Oh look, see it hovering among the flowers,
It is like a baby trying to walk
and not knowing how to go....
Acoma


A voice
I will send
Hear me
The land
All over
A voice
I am sending
Hear me
I will live.

Teton Sioux

April is National Peotry Month: Library

Valerie Worth did four volumes of small poems. This anthology has all four collections plus fourteen more small poems in one book. Students always grab this book thinking it will be the best one to read because the poems are all short, making it easy. They are soon pleasantly surprised to learn that these small poems carry quite a punch. The other part I really like about this book is the delightful illustrations by Natalie Babbitt that I had only known as an author of books like Tuck Everlasting. Her precise black and white drawings give extra meaning to each poem.

Library
No need even
To take out
A book: only
Go inside
And savor
The heady
Dry breath of
Ink and paper,
Or stand and
Listen to the
Silent twitter
Of a billion
Tiny busy
Black words

-Valerie Worth

April is National Poetry Month: Dog Music

Dog Music is an anthology edited by Joseph Duerner and Jim Simmerman dedicated to dogs. I really love the collection, but as always with poems about pets, too many of them are sad. Today I didn't want to share a poem about the death of a dog. Here is a happier one about a springer spaniel named Cynthia.

Lines on a Dog's Face

Wallace said, "What the eye beholds may be
The text of life," and in this case it is
The Springer, Cynthia, whose eyes
Are the brown corridors of vaduity,
Moral deserts where the absolute Nothing
Is, or nothing but her repetitions,
The fence line patrol, the daily quarrels
With the cat, begging always for scraps
And a nap to sleep it off, then waiting
Alert for something to be known.

Agent of operation, living primordium,
Memoir of Something clearly in her stare
Which would say only, "I have known this
For a very long time, retriever
Of the stick locked in crocodile teeth,
Living the life of the fanciful
Scenario, chasing doves, the evening
Meal, her wrinkles busily playing
Out a program, a sontermporary opinion,
The repetitions that govern her earth, and mine.

-Michael Gessner

My springer spaniel Annie

April is National Poetry Month: A Kitchen Memory

 my mom in her kitchen

I asked my sixth grade students today to explain why they liked poetry. One said " it is like reading a story... only shorter and with better words." Strings: A Gathering of Family Poems is like reading a whole collection of family memoirs... only shorter with stronger images. This anthology illustrates all the strings that tie families together with poems about grandparents, uncles, aunts, siblings, parents, and children to name a few.
Each of us could take any kitchen and conjure up  memories based on sounds, smells, sights, and tastes.

A Kitchen Memory
My mother is peeling an apple over the sink,
her two deft hands effortless and intent.
The skin comes away in the shape of a corkscrew,
red and white by turns, with a shimmer of rose
where the blade in its turn cuts close: a blush,
called out of hiding like a second skin.
Now the apple fattens in her hand;
the last scrap of parings falls away;
and she halves and sections the white grainy meat,
picks up another apple, brushes back
the dark hair at her temple with the knife hand.
The only sound is the fan stirring the heat.
- Roy Scheele

"The Rowdy Girls":Designing Woman Classic: RIP Dixie Carter

One of the things that makes the television sitcom "Designing Women" so endearing is how the script used the four women to deal with serious issues with humor and grace. This one below is most of  a whole episode that dealt with wife abuse. I remember watching this one time with my sister and getting misty eyed. I watched it again this morning when I heard the news about the passing of Dixie Carter. Misty eyed again.

Sibling Assignment #128: " April Is the Cruelest Month"

Silver Valley Girl gave another assignment using the theme of April. "In T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Burial of the Dead”, Eliot refers to April as the cruelest month.  Read the poem, and write about  Eliot’s thoughts on the month of April."
I will link my siblings' posts when they are available. "The Burial of the Dead" is the first section of the much longer poem "The Waste Land".

The Burial of the Dead
by T.S. Eliot

" April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried turbers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour."

You can find the complete poem here.

After the war, through the eyes of a child, April was the cruelest month. It was " mixing memory and desire." After war or any type of winter, we want spring to come badly. Spring represents renewed spirit, reawakening, resurrection. Through the eyes of this child or even through the eyes of this adult woman, April can be cruel. Flowers can bloom, then the earth will freeze. Trees can fill with buds only to be blown away in an afternoon. The first violets can be buried in a late snowfall. Growing up in Kellogg we had a long winter, a gray period, then a short spring that emerged in May. There was always a desire for spring. A yearning for the lilacs to bloom, pansies to be planted, and syringa to burst forth on the hillsides. We were chilly in our light Easter dresses. No Easter egg hunts outside for us. We weren't coming out of a war during our April, but you did often wonder what branches would grow out of the stony rubbish of a long winter.

The end of winter is cruel on the spirits of my students. They are lethargic, often tired, and can't get motivated. Coming back from a break they hoped to greet April with a renewed spirit. It is coming. I saw it when the sun shone for awhile the other day. I saw slumped shoulders when the wind blew and snow fell again shortly after. I see baseball mitts and sunglasses. It is coming.

This represents hope I observed today in my garden. I too wanted to be the hyacinth girl. I didn't have enough to have my arms full, but just the scent of those blue flowers pushed the cruel April away a bit.