I really enjoyed your poem. I liked the way you are initially moved by caring to take in the little cactus. People tend to not give plants that same level of caring that they would to animals, but children seem to be able to attribute feelings to them.
I also liked the way you saw the beauty in a highly adapted, specialized life form that does not appeal to our acculturated idea of beauty. I personally love cacti.
Finally, the killing the cactus with kindness is so perfect. A conscientious child, without a lot of information does what she thinks is best for her green spiny friend. It makes a nice ending to a sweet little story poem!
Very evocative of the season. It has the more autumnal feel, of life slowing down and ending than what I was expecting from the intro (a fall with dogs can be pretty exuberant and lively), but this poem is very well observed and very well written. It makes your reader feel the time and place.
Interesting little observation. It leaves me wondering about the mechanism. Did she become and old woman because she acknowledged it by saying she looked pretty good for her age? Seems like once we start using that relativistic measuring stick, we can never stop. Did she become an old woman because suddenly everyone could seethe inappropriateness of her behavior, by posting? And therein lies the pity. And why the 25 lies?
I love the imagery in this poem. It is really right in the sweet spot for my personal taste. It is fairly raw, but not excessively emotional. It is real and relatable, with a bit of that hard dust bowl edge to it.
I thought it was very real and just emotional enough to really grad you and make you think.
I really enjoyed this tale from the brown-thumbed side. I too am a charter member. Unless it can be tossed out and allowed to make it on its own, I will invariably kill it. I have made a note to try lavender.
I liked the stories progression from the background to the story of the lavender bush. I thought it was effectively done and created a mild suspense in the narrative. Will it or won't it survive? I also liked how the bush showed the potential for being mildly adversarial, yet at the same time appreciated.
One hopes that the lavender bush is still thriving and providing pleasure to your successors in that home!
I enjoyed your perspective on this and largely agree! Seems to me that the compensation you identify for the downside you discuss is pretty small though. And this is even before consideration of the impacts of things like towers, antennae and electromagnetic issues. Cell phones seem like a manufactured need. We had the capability of making the product, but it was necessary to manufacture the demand first. Very few of us were in agony because we had to wait to get home to tell about our day. Those of us with real emergency communication needs already had VHF radio.
I have a friend with the National Park Service in Washington who thinks cell phones are pretty much pure evil. He told me about an "emergency" call they received from a climber on Mount Rainier. He was demanding that a helicopter be dispatched to rescue him from the mountain. It seems that climbing the mountain took longer than he had anticipated and he was going to be late for an "important" meeting. As you point out, in the hands of the self important, these things can be a problem. And of course, if you think back, the self important were the early adopters.
I believe I'll stick to saying I love you. Bye to my loved ones when I actually physically depart, and continue to leave my phone at home.
I really liked this poem! As a tea lover myself I could appreciate the sentiment and as a reader, I liked the rhythmic presentation and the use of words from the quote. You bring some of the same energy and fun to this as you do to your children's poems, but with a more subtle wryness.
I liked the rhythm and feel of this poem. It's nicely worded and uses pleasing imagery to help the reader feel the garden and enjoy being there. Stanzas 1, 2 and 4 are all spot on for this.
I had a bit of trouble with stanza 3. It just made me think Dust Bowl! But that's just me.
Definitely some weird jobs! And you tell about them well.
I love the way you take what the jobs actually are and use those terms that in idiomatic English mean something totally different. It makes it really funny to think about. I think the watching paint dry gig might have been sort of fascinating. I can see where there would be a lot more to it if you thought about it. Of course that sort of deep analysis would probably have biased the watcher!
The paint drying section felt a bit repetitive, but I imagine the job might have too.
This is a pretty description of a sunset. I liked the descriptive choices you made for the colors, and the way that you progress through this sequentially, from sunset to dusk to dark.
The feelings this evokes are implied rather than stated. It would be a different poem if it were more emotional and less observational.
I enjoyed this little essay! Any parent/grandparent/ primary school teacher etc. has certainly been through similar, and can appreciate how well told this is. I like the matter-of-fact tone in which it is told and the lack of excessive drama. I makes it very nicely relatable, and shows the professionalism of the narrator.
You really capture the feel of those little no-name store/gas stations along the secondary highways in the Great Plains. It is hard to tell the difference between anything form South Dakota and the Texas Panhandle. And of course they all come with a mutt that seems to match the mood of the place.
I like the way you do this little scene without anything weird happening or excess drama. It's just a great little descriptive piece that could happen to anyone traveling the scenic byways of America.
I particularly liked the interaction between the narrator and the dog over the ice cream. The dog has that entirely too-tired-to-get-excited attitude, and the narrator is happy to go along with that. Pretty true to life!
I really enjoy your poetry for children! This one takes one of those childhood milestones and makes it entirely kid relatable. Staying home alone for the first time is such a big deal, and then finding all those everyday noises to be so changed when outside the comfort zone of an adult in the house!
I particularly liked how you resolved the terrifying noise by letting the child gradually work it out, rather than by having mom come home and save them. Much more fun!
Great advice and reasonably realistic. My observation is that discerning news from commentary is much more difficult now than it once was. There are a lot of so-called news organizations that are deliberately distorting and even fabricating. I makes it very hard on the consumer of news.
I personally tell my grad students that primary sources are best. Read the court cases, read the scientific reports, read the speech transcripts. Then make up your own mind. Even a well-intentioned filter is still a filter.
Also, set parameters for what actually matters to you. The world is not nearly as scary a place as the news makes it appear sometimes. One of the biggest differences between now and when us boomers were kids is that things completely outside our environment are constantly trumpeted, just to fill air time. I don't mean wars, environment and macro-economic issues that are of global import, I mean local stories that bleed or shock.
A nice consideration of an ancient question. You really capture that feeling of heroism being entirely in the eye of the beholder or in this case the actor. Right is not seen as an absolute, but rather as whatever advances the interests of the actor. The introspection should be universal as well, but it often seems to be exceptional.
Another really nicely structured poem, with a relatable, universal message. I like how you capture the spirit of zazen in this; the focus on the present moment and mindfulness, but the dawning awareness of the eternal. It is a beautifully accessible approach to an infinite concept.
Good observation here on writing. I think most authors make a distinct separation between works they intend to publish and works that are exercises, or merely for themselves. I know that most of what I write is still relegated to paper notebooks and written with pen or pencil. It's never intended to see the light of day.
I think many writers make tremendous use of this private work. It serves as exercises, it allows experience with expressing things that you might not otherwise want to commit to the page, and may include the truly mundane, like in my case, a list of birds seen out my office window.
You make a good cogent case for the value of your private writing.
I enjoyed this poem. It has a clever rhythm and structure that draws a reader in and keeps them going with it. I like how it sort of invites you to hear it in your head. There is no heavy moralizing, just a nice practical approach to living.
This is a nice introspective poem. The rhythm and rhyme structure are mostly solid, with only an occasional stretch. Given where the poem is going, that doesn't detract from the effect.
I like the little incongruity, where it has a bit of darkness in the subject matter, but the structure is kind of jaunty and inviting. It makes feel like the author is a person who is coming to a place of peace and acceptance in their life. Sort of "this is me and that's how it is".
That's really entertaining little rhyme. I can see kids really having fun with it!
I liked all the different options presented, some lethal and some merely entertaining. While I am personally a spider advocate, and would have opted for just taking it outside, I have to say I liked the way you avoided any cutesy moralizing and got right down to business in the end. I think it made the rhyme more fun!
I like this clever rhyme. It does strike me as a perfect kids poem. It has the elements of a puzzle, of what happens when you ignore parental wisdom, and the fun of potential repetition. It has reasonable consequences for reasonable actions, so it avoids the dark and keeps it amusing and light.
I really liked the visualizations of your emotions; the fireball, the blue cloud and the quicksand. The visualizations really seem to fit the emotions you want to describe, and they also allow for the visualization of escaping from the negativity.
You can understand some of the bumps and bruises you've experienced from the way the tiredness catches you and forces you to reach for your calming ritual and visualization. I like the way you tell us what the solution to these times is for you.
I liked this discussion of how traditional naming has worked in the cultures in your background. I particularly enjoyed your discussion of how the family dealt with sorting the numerous Johns, Nancys and Stephens. Lots of necessary creativity in that.
Our family never really had naming traditions like that and among the 33 first cousins (including me and my sisters) there is not a single duplicate. I personally have five younger sisters none of who are named after any relative, except my sister Tina Louise, who is named for my great aunt Tina and great uncle Louis. If I had had a brother, he was destined to be named Clarence Joseph, after the two grandfathers, so it's probably good he never appeared. Note that Joseph Clarence was nixed because my goo Catholic parents were concerned that with the initials JC people would be calling him Jesus Christ.
I have at various times advocated naming kids after common household objects; Colander seems like name anyway. Or when the hippies were naming their children after the vegetation and wildlife (Redwood, Seagull, etc.) that children be given proper taxonomic names, like Larus occidentalis for Seagull or Sequoia sempervirens for Redwood. Or Notemigonus crysoleucas if you like fish.
Anyway, this was easy to follow, even with the oft repeated names, and had a pleasantly gentle sense of humor throughout. I liked the way your familial nomenclature evolved and was particularly happy to see that the lasagna recipe survived!
I like this little story of the battle of the corkscrew. I have certainly been through many varieties of them, including the armed one you like.
I liked the description of the trials of using the straight pull type corkscrews. All the gyrations you try to get the desired result is descriptive and funny. For the record, high in the Chisos Mountains of west Texas (the mountains were high, I was just working on it) I once managed to fling a bottle of Merlot across a camp site and watch as it emptied into the rocky ground. I managed to preserve about half a glass.
The armed corkscrews are definitely marvels, but in my experience, the latter day versions have a limited lifespan. I've now switched to the versions that have a folding lever and look about like an old Buick bumper jack. I found it on a sandbar on the Brazos, so the price was right too!
You really describe the process of operating the armed corkscrew well! It is easy to visualize and understand.
The structure of this was nice, with the lead in and discussion about wine rituals and your pleasure in them. I found no typos or other editorial trivia.
Brazos54
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