First Autumnwinter Snow - Poem #223

First Dusting - November 6, 2010

Photo by Amy LV

Poem Drafts for "Overnight"

by Amy LV

It snowed here yesterday!  Our family woke to fristyfrost on the grass and powdered sugar on the rooftops.  Henry and Georgia went out and danced, and Henry threw the first snowball of this season.  A tiny one, right at our front door!  All was melted and gone within a few hours, but we know it will be back soon...for good.

Students - If you look above, you can see the handwritten drafts for today's poem.  We were on a long car trip yesterday, and I scribbled as Mark drove (much safer than scribbling as I drove!)  "Overnight" began as a one stanza poem, but as I read it over and over again, I realized that it needed something more.  You might have noticed that the last two lines of the first stanza are the same as the first two lines of the second stanza.  Why?  I just liked them and wanted to say them over again.  Reading and rereading, I still liked hearing them next to each other.  I feel like they give the poem a kind of marveling feeling, just like we had when we awoke one day ago.

After writing this poem, I dug back in to play with the sounds, to see if I could play with alliteration, or repeating of initial sounds.  For example, the third line originally read, "snuggled in the pines", but it now reads "snuggled in spruces".  "In darkness as I dreamed" (line 5) was originally "in the dark as I slept". 

Teachers - if your students have written a whole lot of poems, you might challenge them to dip in again and play with the words of one or two lines, examining each word closely and asking, "Might I choose a different word, a word with sounds to match the beginning sounds I have already used?"

You might also notice all kinds of little jottings on the side of this poem.  That's a habit - jottings and alphabets and numbers and word lists.  Everywhere.

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