On Day 7 of National Poetry month, for VerseLove at Ethical ELA, Chris Goering invites teacher-poets to compose around song structures by borrowing syllables, meter, rhyme scheme, etc.
My youngest son came immediately to mind.
Before he was born, he would get very still when the piano was played in church; he would become active again when it stopped. I was sure he was listening to the music. At five he said he wanted to be a choir director when he grew up… he now has a degree in worship ministry.
Here’s a scene from long ago, about his first favorite song.
Amazing Grace, Age Three
My boy hummed the song before he knew What it meant to weep for grace What could he know of a shattered soul In spite of his solemn face?
At the whiteboard he stood, making marks Counting every beat he heard: “Adders deedle-dee, adders, adders…” -For at three, grace needs no words
In all the generations of finches hatched in wreaths on my front door I have never known a mother to lay just one egg and leave
but that is what your mother did last Sunday.
Here you’ve been ever since resting in your nest, forlorn in the freezing cold
day after day after day
one blue egg one blue door one long blue silence one blue human (that would be me, Franna, sad self-appointed custodian checking on you every morning)
until Friday
when, out of the blue, there were TWO of you!
On Saturday, three!
On Sunday, no more… although I heard the most beautiful singing at my door
then on Monday… FOUR.
Little Blue Eggs galore.
I do not know where your parents were during those five days of your cold blue lonesomeness or how your mother could withhold her charming clutch for so long
but I know this thing: your father and mother sing every morning like tiny angels in eggsultation
and so do I.
Little Blue Egg gets a sibling five days later
A quartet of Little Blue Eggs… joy!
A short clip of the parents’ music… it echoes throughout the house. No wonder that finches symbolize joy or that their collective noun is a “charm.” Some sources say only males sing; others say females sing in spring. Listening to their bright morningsong, I am reminded of these lyrics from O Come, All Ye Faithful: Sing, choirs of angels, sing in exultation…
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with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge
note: the letter to Little Blue Egg (alone no more!) is an epistolary poem for Day Five of National Poetry Month
I still do not know where your parents are at present.
I am just your surrogate human grandmother figure who lives behind the blue door where you lie resting in your beautiful downy nest in the magnolia wreath.
Quite alone since your Sunday debut.
Three days now.
You ought to have had at least couple of sibling eggs, but…
Here is what I have learned, since learning is the only thing I can do in this situation of waiting to see how Nature acts on your behalf:
Sometimes a mother bird’s egg-laying gets interrupted. Your mother may resume. I haven’t known this to happen before with our house finch families, but let’s not dwell on that right now.
Sometimes a mother finch lays just one egg. Again, I haven’t known this to happen before, but… maybe you’re all she has. Which means you are very precious, indeed.
Sometimes a mother finch will lay eggs and wait for some time before returning to incubate them, as a means of diverting attention from the nest. It’s a ploy to keep you safe. I could have sworn I heard your parents chatting at the nest late yesterday afternoon. I so expected another egg…
Because a mother may wait a rather long time to return, overly interested humans (ahem) should wait a month (a MONTH!) before assuming a nest and egg are abandoned. There is hope for you yet, Little Blue Egg…
Meanwhile, I’ve done all I can for my front porch bird sanctuary… or should I say egg sanctuary? As always, I put up a sign warning visitors of your nest with instructions to use another door. My family knows to leave the front door bolted (just in case, I put a reminder sign inside: STOP! -birds-).
Meanwhile, with temperatures dipping into the twenties overnight, I cannot help thinking about your cold blue lonesomeness. I am making myself take heart that there can be a pretty good span of time before incubation begins…that you still have a window for survival…
Meanwhile, there are PLENTY of other things with which to concern myself. In the whole of the universe, you are but one little blue egg; yet your tiny solitary presence affects me. Maybe it has something to do with all the work your parents put into creating this beautiful nest and the expense of egg production is to your mother. Very costly, that. Should you, her current one and only, not hatch…it seems, in the scheme of things, a grievous loss.
Granted, grievous losses happen in the world every single day, and my species is not the best (by far) at fathoming (or preventing) them.
For the record: I love birds. Something about you gives wings to something in my soul. House finch songs are particularly joyful; indeed, you’re a bona fide omen of joy (I looked it up long ago). Early in the morning, doxology of joy; in the blue hour, evensong of joy.
This present silence, dear Little Blue Egg, feels immense.
Know that I am pulling for you while watching from a distance.
Your hopeful resident human-guardian-grandmother, Franna
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with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Slice of Life Story Challenge every day in the month of March
Every March, house finches build a nest on top of my front door wreath.
The mother usually lays three or four pale blue eggs. The babies fledge and fly away all too soon.
In 2020, when COVID-19 struck the face of the Earth, the finches built their nest but laid no eggs. I don’t know why; it was one more thing to mourn.
Last year, the finches returned and laid five eggs—a record! Making up for the previous year? I wondered.
And so it is March again, and again there’s a finch nest on my front door. These seem to appear overnight, as magically as mushrooms in the lawn.
And on Sunday, there was an egg:
My soul rejoiced.
The birds are a marvel; their songs are a marvel. They lift my spirits immeasurably. Every nest is different; this one has lovely down and fiber running through it. So soft. Last year’s was very green. One nest in years past was trimmed in tiny flowers. Finch dads are mixed media artisans; they collect the materials. This papa seems especially considerate and nurturing.
So, as an annual bird Franna, I check on my grand-eggs daily until my tiny pink grand-finches appear. The eggs hatch one day at a time, for they are laid one day at a time, usually in the mornings between 7:00-9:00.
Here, Friends, is where the plot thickens…
As of today (I am writing this on Monday afternoon), there remains just the one little blue egg.
I am concerned.
I know, go ahead and tell me all the things about birds and Nature knowing how to manage perfectly well, but… it’s so cold and windy here… I think I’ve heard the finches, but I haven’t seen the mother on the nest incubating her egg yet. Or laying any more. Why? Will there even BE a baby bird, or…
I know, sometimes things happen. Sometimes we get to know the what and the why; sometimes we don’t.
Meanwhile… I keep thinking of you, Little Blue Egg, all cold and alone…which drives me to look things up; I have learned that an egg can be viable for maybe two weeks before a mother incubates it.
Blessed reassurance…
probably absurd this obsession with a bird —this one egg, really— wish I could do more than wait for Nature to rule its fate
—sigh—
—Stay tuned, y’all.
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with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Slice of Life Story Challenge every day in the month of March
For years now, I’ve caught glimpses of her when I’m driving down a certain road near my home. Between fields and old farmhouses are patches of woods, and that is where I see her.
I might confess that ever since I was a child, whenever I ride by an expanse of woods, I’ve daydreamed about seeing people amongst the trees as I go whipping past. Maybe people of long ago, making a reappearance on the land where they once lived and hunted. Maybe enchanted people, unable to go beyond some magical barrier, or simply relegated to this place of relative obscurity where they are least likely to be detected. In summer, the woods are full and dark; their secrets are more secret than ever, but in winter, the woods are revealing. So many trees are bare and shafts of sunlight illuminate the papery russet detritus of the forest floor…when I ride past in wintertime, I imagine someone stepping back in the shadows, or bending over a cookpot, or doing whatever it is one would do in a secluded woodland semi-existence.
So, actually seeing this maiden in the nearby woods for the first time gave me quite a turn. Now, of course, I know she’s there. I’ve been trying to figure out who or what she is. Perhaps a dryad (Narnia, anyone?), the shy female spirit of a tree, usually an oak in Greek mythology. Dryads look something like their trees and can live for centuries. Or maybe a hamadryad, a nymph so intimately bound to her tree that if the tree dies, she dies, too (anyone remember the scene in The Last Battle when the beechtree nymph runs to the Narnian king, Tirian, to say the talking trees are being felled, then falling and vanishing as her own tree is cut down?).
Although I could never get a good enough look at this maiden in the woods to decide if she might be a dryad or hamadryad, she didn’t seem “tree-ish” enough. No. For one thing, she wears clothes. A top as blue as the bluest untroubled sky, the kind with no clouds in sight, so blue it imparts an inexplicable ache in the heart. She has a long white skirt and some kind of white headdress. And she carries something red in her hands—berries? Grapes? What IS that, and what is she, and why is she standing out here in these woods?
One day, I kept telling myself, I’m gonna stop this car and get a picture…
And so I did.
Last week I pulled off the road and quickly got my shot… I dared not go too far or get too close, as I don’t know whose land this is and… well… you know… possible enchantments…
She appears to be a young Roman woman carrying a harvest of grapes home from a nonexistent vine. Not a goddess, not a dryad. I can’t discern why she’s here. A puzzle. No obvious reason that I can see. I wonder, too, if she was once pale marble or all bronze or solid gray cement—turned to stone, perhaps?—before some artist, whomever it was, chose to spruce her up with color. No telling how old she is, how long she’s been here, and why, why…so many untold stories…
I bet the trees know all about it. I would ask, if only I understood Tree. For they do speak to one another, you know. They have a whole communication network of their own, underground, in the air…
But I am merely human, and as always, the trees hold their mysteries close.
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with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Slice of Life Story Challenge every day in the month of March.
—on the second anniversary of school shutdowns due to COVID-19—
Bleak days. A long, rain-spattered, windswept season, gray as ashes, as stones, just as hard, cold, and immovable. Day to day to day the green promise of spring seems like a dream barely remembered; naked tree branches twist skyward as if beseeching the heavens for renewal…
We go through the motions, automatons numbed by a pandemic not quite past and the ripple effect of unprovoked war on the world stage, as if we’ve somehow fallen through a wormhole to eight decades ago… what year IS this?
I am tired,my colleagues at school tell one another. So tired. Some don’t know if they’re coming back next year. Some don’t know if they’re going to stay in education at all. Our principal is leaving in four weeks.
The children have seemed shell-shocked most of this year. Maybe I seem the same way to them, especially now that masks are optional and I find myself not recognizing some of them; I’ve never seen them without masks before. I don’t know their faces below their eyes.
As I walked the hallways last week, I had a sense of dragging myself over a finish line, except that there is no finish line. Not now, not yet…
But even in the bleakest, rain-spattered, windswept season, when gray goes grayer still, bits of brightness are always swirling. Maybe as tiny as a feather, a soft semiplume shed from a creature with the gift of flight. It might appear to be half one thing and half another… it might have the appearance of dark, wispy, wayward hair as well as a tapered tip dipped in fiery red, altogether like an artist’s brush with which we might, we just might, begin to dispel despair by painting our moments as we will…
So much symbolism in a feather. In the bird that releases it.
It is said that when cardinals appear, angels are near.
I don’t know about that.
I just know a cardinal feather is a symbol of life, hope, and restoration. And courage. And love. And sacrifice…
Falling from the grayest sky Ethereal, riding the wind Alluding to nearness of angels Tiny trace of a nearby cardinal that Has lost a bit of his insulation Ephemeral, perhaps, to him Restorative tincture, to me
Semiplume cardinal feather photographed by my friend, E. Johnson, 3/11/2022.
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with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Slice of Life Story Challenge every day in the month of March.
On this final, frosty February morn, I wasn’t sure I had stamina enough to endure the day. For a short month, February can be so long. Teachers know.
I bundle up. I get in the car. I sigh. Could I manage to take half a day? Is it worth it? Probably not. A moment at a time, a moment at a time…
I drive. The empty fields seem sugarcoated with ice. I look for hawks. I am always looking for hawks. I don’t know why they lift my spirits so. They just do.
No hawks. No plump little goats in the goat pen by the stop sign, either. But something different in the glassy pond…
A great blue heron.
Symbol of self-determination, paragon of peace, harbinger of spring. Stoic, tall, unflinching. Stunning.
I stopped to take a picture of my beautiful heron but it’s not clear enough to post. I have to content myself with sharing this one instead; mine looked so like this.
Pleasant evening drive after a taxing workday heading to supper
ahead, in the road, a little creature trotting like some kind of cat
I said, What IS that? I can’t tell, said my husband so sphinx-like, it was
long, low, and silver big pointy ears, feline grace canine whiskered face
—oh! we cried, a fox!— as it vanished, phantom-like, in the shrouding woods.
We’d have known it right away, had it been red. We see those occasionally. Gray foxes are actually native to the area, however; the red fox didn’t appear in this part of the country until the 1800s. I cannot recall having seen a gray fox before. It was small and lovely, with a grizzled silver coat so prized by hunters. These are the only foxes that can climb trees.
I wonder where our enigmatic gray fox was going on its jaunt along the woodland road just before dusk…and how many more of its kind are about, in the secret places…
On the last day of the February Open Write at Ethical ELA, Britt Decker invites participants to write a poem based on a picture book, taking inspiration from beautiful lines, illustrations, or theme.
My little acrostic is inspired by Inky’s Amazing Escape: How a Very Smart Octopus Found His Way Home, by Sy Montgomery (a true story).
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The Long-Reaching Tentacle of Adaptability
“Sometimes the keeper gave Inky toys. Inky liked to take apart LEGO blocks, and put them back together. He liked playing with Mr. Potato Head. One time, with his suckers, he pulled off Mr. Potato Head’s eyes and handed them to the starfish in his tank.”
Once upon a time, a Child yearned To understand why Others seem such a Puzzle Until she learned She didn’t have to solve them.
From Inky’s Amazing Escape: How a Very Smart Octopus Found His Way Home, written by Sy Montgomery, illustrated by Amy Schimler-Safford. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, New York, 2018.
I am in awe of octopuses. Inky’s story is etched on my heart. There’s something so poignant to me in his giving Mr. Potato Head’s eyes to the starfish.
with thanks to Susan Ahlbrand who honored today’s date (2-22-22) by inviting participants to write palindrome poems on Ethical ELA’s Open Write.
Yesterday was a day off for my district. My son brought my little four-month-old granddaughter over for a visit. I wanted to write about these sweet, sweet moments…
Moments with Micah
I would make time stand still to savor you more to marvel at the miracle of your existence (your dad says he still can’t believe you are real).
Every day you are changing growing in size knowing in your eyes so wonderfully made rose-satin skin tiny sweet hands gripping my heart.
My heart gripping tiny sweet hands rose-satin skin so wonderfully made knowing in your eyes growing in size—
you are changing every day.
You are real.
He still can’t believe, your dad says of your existence.
To marvel at the miracle to savor you more I would make time stand still.
with thanks also to the weekly Slice of Life Story Challenge writing community; writers need places to call home.
lit bits and pieces 