Come on Over for Leftovers & Poem #244

Again!?

by Georgia LV

We bought a 30 pound Thanksgiving turkey this year.  You know what this means, don't you?  I don't have to cook for months!  Seriously, we have a lot of turkey in our refrigerator, and while we've eaten five meals of Thanksgiving dinner, this week the turkey will morph into different mystery dishes, starting with  turkey barbecue, a dish not mentioned in this poem.

Students - the idea for this poem came as I set out the platter of turkey for yet another meal.  The whole thing just made me laugh, and that laughter made me want to write a poem about turkey leftovers.  I am not the most creative cook, so I went hunting around the internet to find lists of real turkey recipes.  If you check out Mike's Leftover Turkey Recipes and Leftover Turkey Recipes from Razzle Dazzle Recipes, you will find some of the real recipe names I found!  I looked for recipes that rhymed and went from there.

Something interesting about this poem is that the shape of my first draft looked quite different.  You can see it here.

After looking at the poem this way, I began wondering how it would look with "Turkey" on a line by itself, over and over.  That seemed funnier somehow, so I printed it out both ways and took a poll of my family by asking, "Which version do you like better?"  The top version (my favorite too) won.  You may have a different opinion, and that's perfectly allowed.  Neither is right, but it sure is fun to go back and forth.  It sure is fun to revise.

What's important to note about this is that we can take our exact same words and lay them out on the page in different ways.  This is one way to revise a poem: switch up the line breaks!

For a rollicking read aloud poem, one which I am sure subliminally inspired me here, visit Poets.org to read Jack Prelutsky's "Bleezer's Ice Cream."

Today marks the 2/3 way point through my year to write and post a new poem each day...what a wonderful time it has been.  Many thanks to all of you for riding along with me!

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