Breakfast Pear
Photo by Amy LV
Students - Happy New Year! I am finally back after a lovely holiday filled with visitors and visiting and so much food. I hope that your January is off to a warm and cozy start, and I wish you so much goodness as we make another trip around the sun together.
Today's poem was inspired by my breakfast, shown in the photograph above, and the final stanza of this poem is a true one for me. My loving grandma Florence Ethel Conolly Dryer did say these words to my mom, and she keeps them alive so that now and forever...pears will taste like perfume to me. My grandma was a great teacher and a poet who loved theatre, battled depression, and brought so much kindness into our lives. Each time my mom tells me a story or shares something that Grandma used to say, I hold on to the words.
What about you? Whose words rise regularly in your mind, even once every long while? What did you eat for breakfast? Who do you miss? One of the interesting things about life is that one thought leads to another leads to another, and if we follow the crumbs, the trail can sometimes add up to a little verse.
Below you can see the happily scribbled draft of this poem, written in the wee hours of this morning before I drove my husband to school. Notice that even though the final words appear here, the line breaks are different. Often when I move from a handwritten draft to a typed one, this is something that changes. It is so easy to change line breaks on a computer, and I am thankful for that.
Draft for Today's Poem
(Click to Enlarge)
Photo by Amy LV
As I wrote the first two lines of this poem (four lines in the first draft), I felt myself remembering one of my favorite books, Lynn Reiser's CHERRY PIES AND LULLABIES, a list story sharing the ways that traditions change - and also stay much the same - through generations. The rhythm of this book still lives within me, just like my grandma's pear-words.
CHERRY PIES AND LULLABIES by Lynn Reiser
Might you be able to think of a book you've heard or read many times and write a poem or story or essay somehwat inspired by its story or rhythm? The world is strewn with good ideas, like the zillions of snowflakes covering our Western New York world.
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