Unexpected Intersections

I've always viewed scrapbooking as a form of storytelling. It's how we preserve the stories of the people and experiences in our lives. One of the first scrapbook pages I ever made was called "I is for Immigrant."  My poem today is a poetic interpretation of that page. It's a shape poem - a poetic form where the words on the page form a shape related to the content of the poem. This week's Poetry Friday is hosted by Matt Forrest at Radio, Rhythm, and Rhyme . Hop over here to find links to the other writers participating this week.

  Today is Unesco's World Book and Copyright Day . I was fortunate enough to start my educational life at a school that encouraged reading, and it was there that my love of story took root.  Mine was a fairly solitary childhood, but with a book, I could enter the worlds of the characters I was reading about, and they became my companions.  I read about dragons, sentient space ships, and the life of a family in political exile.  I read books set in space, fantasy worlds, Siberia, England and New Zealand.  I read books by contemporary authors, and authors long dead.  I read poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction.  Books took me on journeys through time and space and around the world, and all the while offered me a safe place to curl up in when I needed it. Once I was showing our neighbor our apartment (we have the same floor plan and she wanted to see how we were using the space). When we came around the corner to the study, she gasped. "You have so many books!" I looked

Last April I posted a golden shovel poem based on Robert Frost's "Ghost House." Now, a year later, almost to the day, I'm posting about poetry again, with yet another nod to Robert Frost.  It's been a poetic year for me. It's also been a year with limited time for writing. Perhaps that's why, since writing that poem last April, I've been spending more and more time in poetry. I've discovered new favorite poems , and new favorite poets . New poetry is becoming a part of my DNA, the words and phrases coming to mind spontaneously as they resonate on the same frequency as my life. Yesterday, walking in the park, I saw this fellow standing in the stream. As soon as I saw him standing there, the opening lines of Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken"  sprang to mind: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the under