April is National Poetry Month. It’s time to get your poetry on, if you have any that is. Time to write poems, read poems, discuss poems.
I must confess I’ve never been that good at poetry. I occasionally write poems, usually from a fleeting spurt of inspiration. If I don’t get the words down when the inspiration hits, poof, it’s gone. If I do write poetry, it’s almost always of the rhyming type, and often inspired by an event such as a holiday, someone’s birthday, or by some cause I’m all worked up about. When my local newspaper cut back from being a nice daily newspaper to a three-day a week paper, with a crummy, hard to access online version, I was inspired to pen this verse to the local editor:
“I’ve tried to be open-minded, I’ve given it a good try,
But reading your e-replica on Android just makes me want to cry.
What were you thinking when you came up with such a clunky set up?
You should have tried harder so your subscriptions would not let up!
Gazette on Kindle equals “D minus”, on Android equals fail.
No Doonesbury, no NY Times Crossword – it all makes me want to wail!
You took away my favorite parts,
and gave me boring self-help columnists whose words hit me like darts
Your new Gazette just makes me want to holler,
and long for the old days when newspapers were worth every dollar.”
(Original poem by Huffygirl, © 2012)
The editor, though impressed with my verse, did nothing to improve the paper, It’s still crummy, still doesn’t work on Android, and still lacks the NYT crossword and Doonesbury. But, I digress.
The Poetry Whisperer, age seven.
My happiest poetry moment occurred when my youngest son was in second grade. He had a teacher, Sister Salmonella, who turned out to be an awful teacher, but had one good quality, which was having the students memorize and recite poetry. What could be cuter than a group of sweet-faced seven-year-olds standing together and reciting funny rhyming poems to their doe-eyed parents? Listening to their recitation would just make your heart melt.
The highlight of the poetry recitation came around Mother’s Day. Sister Salmonella had the students memorize the poem “Mother doesn’t want a dog” by Judith Viorst, and coached them to recite it at home for their moms on Mother’s Day. My son, being the darling little boy that he was, took it to the next level. After reciting the poem for me, he sat his seven-year old self down at my new state of the art word processor (okay, that’s a fancy typewriter) that I had gotten from my husband for Mother’s Day, and hunted and pecked until he had typed out the entire poem for me. Ah, heart melting all over again. I framed it and still have it today.(Insert contented motherly sigh here.)
May your poetry month be rhyming and cheery, and I hope all those poems don’t make you grow weary!
© Huffygirl 2012
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