Unexpected Intersections

We are surrounded by snails. We see snails of all sizes on the paths after the rain. We see large land snails, brought to Switzerland by the Romans, who liked to eat them (they're protected by law now). This one's shell is about 2 inches in diameter, and his foot is about 3 inches long. And we see snails in the pond on our daily walks.  This poem is the result of my musings as I watched the pond snails like the one above. Our host for Poetry Friday this week is Jan at Bookseed Studio . Mosey on over to find lots of wonderful poetry to linger over this week. Thank you Jan for hosting us! Next week the round up party is here! The post will go live and ready for posting links at midnight UTC+1 time. I can't wait to see what poetic goodies you'll bring to the party!

  Spring is here! Officially, on the calendar, and unofficially (or is it more officially?), in nature. Every day we see more blooms. photo © 2022, Elisabeth Norton Snowdrops were followed by crocuses, and now the daffodils are stealing the show.  photo © 2022, Elisabeth Norton This expanse of daffodils, which we see on our lunchtime walks, has been reminding me of William Wordsworth's classic poem about daffodils every time we pass it, so this week I decided to reread it and look for other poems about daffodils.  Daffodils by William Wordsworth I wander'd lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils, Beside the lake, beneath the trees Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.                             read the rest of the poem here .  Though we're not walking over hills and vales, Wordsworth's poem defini...

My very first Poetry Friday poem was inspired by the fact that my mother taught English as a Foreign Language when I was growing up. Our church ran a free program which allowed my mother, whose dream of being a teacher had to be deferred when she left high school, to finally realize that dream.  As a teen, I assisted the teacher of the children's class, and one of the highlights of every semester was the potluck dinner. From Poland to Thailand, Guatemala to Vietnam, at every potluck the table was full of the culinary specialities of the many countries our students had come from - side by side in one delicious feast. I looked forward to my favorites, loading up my plate with delicious flavors and foods that I would never have encountered, were it not for the fact that we had been brought together from many countries to learn and eat. In food, we can celebrate and appreciate our differences, while at the same time being drawn together by the sharing of it. Food has been on my mind a...

This week my students will be taking a test that includes the present continuous verb form. We use the present continuous to talk about actions that have started, and are not yet finished. As I prepare my test for my students, I realize that I've been in a present continuous frame of mind all week. On lunchtime walks, we see signs of spring; in the news, we read about fighting near Europe's largest nuclear plant and wonder if we should start carrying our iodine tablets* with us when we go out.  We are living in a present continuous state of cognitive dissonance. *All residents of Switzerland living within a certain proximity of a nuclear plant are issued iodine tablets in case of an emergency. We never thought the emergency might come from fighting around a nuclear plant across the continent. In my poem I'm grappling with the cognitive dissonance of such tragedy unfolding, and yet my own daily life and those of my family have (to this point) not been impacted by it. We work...

I'm processing the events of the past few days in poetic fragments.  My husband and I witnessed the Chernobyl disaster from two different continents. Last night, I lay in bed on the same continent as Chernobyl, talking with my husband in the darkness when we couldn't sleep, having the conversations we waited to have until our daughter was in bed. And in the wee hours of this Poetry Friday, I got up with her, as I do every day. Our wonderful Poetry Friday host today is Tricia at The Miss Rumphious Effect . She shares the results of her poetry sisters challenge and has links to all of today's Poetry Friday poets  here . _______ note: Radioactive material was washed out of the sky when it rained. Children were told not to splash in puddles to avoid playing in concentrated contaminated water, and potentially getting it on their clothes.

In our family, we do a lot of thinking about thinking, because we are all neurodiverse (autism and ADHD). We're often engaged in discussions about how our neurodiversity influences the way we experience the world. From how we socialize to how we organize ourselves to complete tasks, our neurodiversity is a factor in everything we do and every experience we have. This week I decided to try to use poetry to express the experience of having ADHD. Although ADHD, like autism, can be characterized by the ability to hyperfocus on a topic or task for an extended period of time, the characteristic that is most commonly associated with ADHD is difficulty in sustaining attention .  In my attempt to express this latter aspect of the ADHD experience I ended up with two poems, both of which use the same metaphor. One is an almost-haiku (haiku-esque?) that's missing a syllable on the middle line, one is free verse. I'd love to know if you have a preference - let me know in the comments!...

 Welcome everyone to Poetry Friday! If you're new to Poetry Friday, you can read more about it here . I've been chasing deadlines all week, but poetry always provides a welcome pause in the busiest of schedules. Perhaps because of the kind of writing I've been doing (which is not related to poetry at all) it was a bit hard to get started on a poem this week. I looked at a few of the poetic forms I've bookmarked over the past months, but in the end, turned to one of my favorite forms, the acrostic .  Thanks for joining the Poetry Friday party today! Add your link to the party below. You are invited to the Inlinkz link party! Click here to enter

On a recent lunchtime walk, we were greeted by this wonderful figure, and I knew the moment I saw her that I would have to write a poem about her.  We've been enjoying the signs of the changing seasons on our walks - including a first for us: watching a squirrel gather and shape a round bundle of moss, before scampering off to presumably bring it to its nest.  Our Poetry Friday host today is Cathy over at Merely Day by Day . Like her, I find myself dipping in and out of Poetry Friday as life and other commitments permit, and she captures this perfectly in her poem.  Thank you for stopping by my little corner of the internet today. I hope you'll wander over to Cathy's blog for a roadmap to all the poetic goodness that awaits you this week. 

It's been great fun this month writing Inktober-inspired haiku, senryu and tanka poems. You can see my prompt list and the first week of poems here , the second week of poems here , and the third week here . I hope you've enjoyed these mostly spooky, sometimes nature-inspired, occasionally random ( baseball playoffs! ) poems.  So now, without further ado, here is the Spooktacular conclusion to my Spooktober project! Our host for Poetry Friday this week is Linda at Teacher Dance . Hop on over to her blog for links to this week's round of poetic goodness.

I'm writing a poem for every day of October, playing with poems inspired by a list of Inktober prompts written in senryu, haiku, and tanka poetic forms. You can read the first week's worth of my Spooktober poems, and see my prompt list, in this post .  I've had a lot of fun with the prompts this week!  I've got some publishing news to share today! I'm thrilled to have two poems included in the 10.10 Poetry Anthology: Celebrating 10 in 10 Different Ways , which includes poems from many Poetry Friday participants.  You can get a peek inside the anthology and order your own copy here .  The editor of the anthology, Bridget Magee , is our host for Poetry Friday this week. Hop on over to her blog to congratulate her on 10 years of blogging and the publication of this wonderful anthology, and to get links to the rest of today's Poetry Friday poems!

I've been immersed in poetry and verse in the past couple of weeks - first in a Novel in Verse virtual workshop led by the amazing Nikki Grimes and Padma Venkatraman, then in my own work as I dived in deep to apply all the insights and tips that I took away from that experience.  Poems arrived in my inbox this week, via the Academy of American Poets newsletter featuring a selection of poems for Indigenous Peoples' Day.  I particularly loved the poem by Rainy Dawn Ortiz that starts: Something Else. Some one else Some where else That place is here, In my home, We are here. You can read the rest of the poem and learn more about the poet here .  One of the things I love about being a part of Poetry Friday is the inspiration to play with different poetic forms. Thoughts about poetic forms were milling around in my mind when they bumped into Inktober, an annual event in which illustrators create a drawing each day during the month of October. Sparks flew and an idea was born. I...

A poem about pandemics, and friendship, on this Poetry Friday. I awake to a world constrained by autumn fog that limits how far I can see. Train and bus carry me through the fog through the neighboring villages through the city towards my friend — but at each stop along the way the wider world remains hidden  behind a grey curtain. In the time before face masks and lockdowns,  we greeted each other each week with three kisses on the cheek. We drank tea, we talked, we wrote new words, we shopped at the farmer’s market together. Together   now,  for the first time in months we do not greet with three kisses but we drink tea and talk, and as we do, sun burns through fog, reveals mountain and city, pushes the boundaries of the world back out again to where they used to be. © 2021, Elisabeth Norton, All Rights Reserved Poetry Friday is being hosted by Laura Purdie Salas. You can find all the poetry goodness here .

My recent poem " What the Marmot Kno ws " was still rolling around in my head a couple of weeks ago when we were out on a Sunday afternoon bike ride. As I watched one yellow leaf drift slowly along the river, a sure sign that fall is coming, I started thinking about "What September Knows." Yesterday on our lunchtime walk, the squirrels were very busy, shaking hazelnuts down from the tree and running to hide them. And today, the path was dotted with crimson leaves. So I decided to finish off the poem that I started on that Sunday afternoon.  Our wonderful host for Poetry Friday today is Denise Krebs over at Dare to Care .  Inspired by another Poetry Friday poet, she wrote an "In A Word" poem. You can discover who inspired her, which creature she wrote about, and all the other poetry goodness awaiting you here . And Poetry Friday's own Laura Purdie Salas will be presenting a webinar next week (Wednesday, 22nd September) on the topic of Work For Hire: W...

 Some days the warmth of summer lingers, but the nights are getting cooler -- a sure sign of fall. Another sign is red apples and a ladder in the orchard. Our wonderful host for Poetry Friday is Heidi Mordhurst. Check out her juicy little universe for all the other wonderful poems that await you today!

Hi everyone! Thanks for coming to the Poetry Friday party today! I'm so glad you stopped by. Last week, Mary Lee Hahn reminded us of the August Poetry Peeps challenge :  We’re writing after the style of Jane Yolen’s eight line, rhyming poem, “What the Bear Knows,” a poem  written in honor of her 400th book ,  Bear Outside . Our topic is  What the ____ Knows .  I love Jane Yolen's work and was excited to take on this challenge.  We love to hike, and one of our favorite things to do when hiking is to look and listen for marmots. They are abundant in the Swiss Alps, and we have spent many a peaceful hour watching them, as other impatient hikers pass us by, unaware that silence and patience will be rewarded with glimpses like this:  I'm looking forward to reading the other Poetry Peeps responses, as well as all of your poetic goodness. Thanks for joining the party! You can add your links here. Click here to enter

Over the summer I've been inspired by the Poetry Friday poets who have written villanelles. This was a new form for me, and I have been simultaneously drawn to and intimidated by this form with its many restrictions. The Villanelle form was floating around in my creative primordial ooze all summer, but no evolution occurred until it bumped up against my desire to write a poem for my daughter's first day of school.  As expected, it was a challenging form to work with. I pretty quickly settled on the number of syllables, and the refrain lines and rhymes, but I was struggling with the second half. I was trying to work with a fixed meter (some sources I looked at said traditional villanelles are written in iambic pentameter). Finally I read over the first half of the poem and asked myself why I liked it so much better than the many lines I was throwing away. I realized that in those lines, I hadn't tried to follow a strict metric pattern, and I liked the internal rhyme that see...

 This week passed by in a whirl of appointments and to-do lists. One of the highlights we participating in Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong 's workshop on Poetry Anthologies. It was jam-packed with insights on the poetry market and practical tips about anthologies: both seeking publication in them, and producing them. If you're interested, they're holding the workshop again on October 16th. There are still a few spots available. For more details about the workshop and how to register, check out this post . My poem today was written early in the summer, before the recent extreme rain and intense storms. As I was biking through the forest, the sounds of summer around me made me want to play with onomotopaeia .  I stopped and pulled out my notebook and pen and tried to capture the essence of the sounds I was hearing. Those were the seeds of this poem. I've been revising it off and on over the summer and this is the version I'm happiest with (so far ;-). Thanks for stoppi...

Another summer poem this week.  Last week while I was waiting for a train, I watched wisps of clouds slowly stretching, twisting and folding back in on themselves. It was mesmerizing - like watching nature's version of a lava lamp.  That experience inspired today's poem.  Mary Lee Hahn is our gracious host for Poetry Friday this week. I hope you'll stop by her blog where many other wonderful poems await you .

After a stormy start, summer sun is finally here. It's been a busy couple of weeks, but as I go here and there on walks and errands, I am always delighted by these fuzzy wisteria seedpods. Today's poem is a little celebration of summer and the many delights it brings. Our Poetry Friday host today is Rebecca Herzog over at Sloth Reads . What a perfect place to hang out and enjoy all the poetry on offer this week !