poems
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A little over a week ago, a dead branch I was cutting knocked me off my extension ladder, causing me to fall seventeen feet to the lawn below. By the grace of God, I broke nothing. Once I got my breath back, I reset the ladder, climbed back up, and finished the cut. I even…
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I have been waiting all year to post this one! Although I wrote this poem three years ago, I’ve had it lingering in the digital wings for a variety of reasons. I had big dreams of this being published elsewhere, in some “reputable magazine,” but a few rejection letters later, and I’ve put that thought…
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Two years ago, one of the art teachers where I work approached me about getting a group of students together on Fridays during lunch for a bit of creative synergy we affectionately dubbed Figure Drawing and Freewrite Fridays. Students came after lunch (or during, in some cases) and sketched charcoal drawings of student or teacher…
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Finally! Of all the color poems I’ve written for this series, violet was the most challenging. Admittedly, part of the issue was simply a matter of time. As I’m sure you’ve realized, there never seems to be enough of it! If only Jim Croce could have put time in a bottle… Writer’s block, or that…
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It’s another one of those life seasons. Little time to be creative as I wrap up another school year. I’m working on my violet poem in any spare moments I can carve out of the day, but I must admit disc golf and time building dams in the creek with my younger boys has been…
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Blue or Purple? That is the question. When I sat down to write my poem inspired by indigo, I didn’t know where to start. Looking at a rainbow, can you clearly pull out the color indigo like you can red or green? I can’t even go to a Crayola crayon box to find the color…
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Of all the colors of the rainbow, I fight with blue the most. Ironically, my closet is filled with dress shirts of various shades of blue, and it’s not even my favorite color! (For the record, I do have shirts of other colors, and my favorite color is actually orange.) We associate so many things…
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Green began when I looked out my back windows and saw the new grass pushing up through the straw we laid down in the late fall after our addition was completed: fresh life sprouting on the new contour of our backyard. I then began meditating on the “evergreen” nature of the color – constant through…
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Back to the color poems! I began my yellow sonnet meditating on the word itself. What if yellow were a greeting? What if it was a command? Then I considered all the things I associate with yellow such as warning signs, yellow jackets, lemons, old lace, egg yolks, and even the less savory uses of…
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After the positive response I received for my selection of five haiku in celebration of International Haiku Poetry Day, I figured there might be an audience for my haikunelle. If you search for the form online, you likely won’t find an official definition of the haikunelle, but I imagined the form six years ago as…
the deepening ground 