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| Details of my Poetry Month Project can be found here. |
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| Wikipedia |
My Uncle's Getting Married
My uncle's getting married
in the church at Broad and High.
He's wearing a tuxedo,
cummerbund and bolo tie.
After all the boring stuff,
it's off to the party house.
We'll eat a fancy dinner
and we'll toast his brand new spouse.
The the fun will really start,
the groom will dance his bride,
we'll do the Macarena,
chicken dance, electric slide.
We'll boogie woogie, bump and grind,
we'll limbo way down low.
We'll shimmy, shake, we'll shuffle, swing
we'll do our best disco.
And when the bride says, "One more dance!"
the conga line she leads.
We ribbon all around the room,
we curve, we swerve, we weave.
A snake of happy revelers,
the young and old alike,
connected hand to waist to back,
we dance away the night.
©Mary Lee Hahn, 2014
I'm giving myself permission to have more fun with this project. I don't think I can write 25 more poems that are exactly about the wonders. So anything at all about the wonder that inspires me is fair game.
Can you tell how I got today's poem from the image of the Great Wall? I hope you can see the conga line in the photo!
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| The details of my Poetry Month project can be found here. |
We All Wait
What's a forgotten catacomb to do?
My tunnels sprawled,
my columns endured,
my stairways persevered.
What's a forgotten catacomb to do?
I cradled the bones of the dead
in silence.
My statues stood guard
in secrecy.
And I waited.
We all wait.
Sometimes
we even know why,
or what for.
Never
in all my centuries
would I have imagined
what would break the monotony
and end my waiting.
What's a forgotten catacomb to do?
A thousand years I waited.
Then a donkey fell through my roof
and the silence, the secrecy, and the waiting were over.
Who would have guessed?
©Mary Lee Hahn, 2014
This is the first wonder I knew absolutely nothing about. Based on my experience yesterday, I knew we would need to do a bit of research before we started writing. I showed my students the image above and we brainstormed the questions we hoped to have answered by our research:
What are catacombs?
Are there traps?
Can tourists go there?
Are there kings, or treasure?
Where are they?
How old are they?
How big are they?
What are they used for?
My reading minilesson plans called for us to think about how we can determine the speaker in a poem (or a text), and in writing, we would try to write from an interesting point of view.
Turns out this was the perfect wonder for personification. You could write from the point of view of the catacombs themselves (as I did) or from the point of view of the donkey that fell through the roof in 1900, leading to the rediscovery of the catacombs. You could be a serpent guarding the doorway, a statue, a dead person buried there, or one of the shards for which the catacombs are named: "Mound of Shards." You could be the desert around it, the sky above it, or the water that's flooded the lowest level.
Carol has a Colosseum poem from yesterday at her blog,
Carol's Corner.
All of my Poetry Month posts can also be found on
my new poetry website.
Amy has the Poetry Friday roundup today at
The Poem Farm. She's certainly one of the wonders of the world!
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| Details of my Poetry Month Project can be found here. |
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| Wikipedia |
COLOSSEUM
Broken soup bowl,
tarnished crown,
gaping eyeholes,
center of town.
Shaken, crumbled,
still you stand.
By history humbled,
yet you're grand.
©Mary Lee Hahn, 2014
Carol Varsalona has a Colosseum poem for today on
Notegraphy. Kevin's Colosseum Fibonacci poem showcases
HaikuDeck.
Carol's poem from yesterday about Stonehenge is at
Carol's Corner.
Kevin wrote a Stonehenge poem in
Notegraphy yesterday. (I can't wait to give this app/website a try!)
It was in my plans for us to write similes and metaphors about the Colosseum as a possible way into our poems. Good thing I tried that before I had my students do it -- I learned that you can't write much when you know next to nothing about your topic. (DUH.) So we started with some quick research.
Bless you, KR. I knew I was ready to pull them all back together for some brainstorming when K said aloud, "I wonder how much cereal it would hold? It looks like a bowl!" We had our first simile.
Then, as they fed me facts they had learned, we worked together to bend them into similes or metaphors. Here's we came up with:
•The colosseum is a bowl. How much cereal would it hold?
FACT: It is big.
•It is as big as the moon. (Nice example of hyperbole!)
FACT: It is old, made in 70 AD.
•The Colosseum is nearly as old as the Pyramid of Giza. (We had a good conversation about why this isn't a simile. It is simply stating how old the Colosseum is. And it's not even true. The pyramid is WAY older.)
•My teacher is nearly as old as the colosseum. (Now that we're comparing two unlike things, we have a simile. And hyperbole, please!!)
•The colosseum is like a crown on a princess’ head. (Simile)
•The colosseum is a crown. (Simile transformed into a metaphor)
FACT: It's made of concrete and stone.
•The Colosseum is as sturdy as the tree branch Ry climbed on. (We wanted a simile that compared the Colosseum to something that really wasn't so sturdy, since it is falling apart. Our read aloud is AS EASY AS FALLING OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH, and Ry is the main character. You can probably guess what happened to the tree branch he climbed on!)
FACT: 500,000 people were killed and over a million animals were killed there.
•The colosseum is a graveyard.
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| Details of my Poetry Month Project can be found here. |
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| Wikipedia |
We stand.
Sun warms us,
wind pushes us,
people stare at us.
We wait.
Moon comforts us,
rain gouges us,
people stare at us.
We know.
Tools made us,
ancients moved us,
people stare at us.
We endure.
History created us,
future sustains us,
people stare at us.
©Mary Lee Hahn, 2014
S t o n e h e n g e
feels hard,
can lift,
sounds silent
very strong
reaches high
to the sky
feels rough.
©JB, 2014
We did another two-column brainstorm for today's poems. This time we thought about what moods the picture evoked, and what sensory images we might include in our poem.
There's so much we don't know about Stonehenge. I tried to capture the solid silence of the stones, and the wonder and amazement that we continue to feel in the presence of this mighty ring of standing stones.
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| Details of my Poetry Month Project can be found here. |
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| Wikipedia |
TIME
Time
in the desert
is as vast as the sky
expanding across blue distance.
Ancient as sand, changeless and thirsty,
time waits, encased in a monumental tomb of stone.
©Mary Lee Hahn, 2014
This year, because April 1 is on a Tuesday, I am including my students in my writing process for this first week. Yesterday we looked at this picture of The Great Pyramid of Giza and did a two-column brainstorming activity with DENOTATION on the left and CONNOTATION on the right. Denotation is where we listed the exactly what we could see in the picture, or facts we gathered from further research. Connotation is where we listed what those facts made us think about, or feel. My denotations were big, old, triangle, sand, desert, brown. My connotations were important, valuable, knowledgeable, solid, balanced, sturdy, strong, classic, time, change, changelessness, vast, empty, silent, dry, hot, thirsty. You can see which ones made it into my poem!
It was fascinating to watch the students' writing move immediately in unique directions based on their own connotations. After 5 minutes of my own writing, I circled the room and found another pyramid-shaped poem, two acrostics (mummy and pyramid), three different voices (a slave, the pyramid, and a conversation between the pyramid and a visitor), and poems about the sand, grave robbers, and oldness. I hope a couple of them will allow me to post their poems here later today!
Jama has a list of the Poetry Month projects around the Kidlitosphere at
Jama's Alphabet Soup. Yours isn't there? Let her know!
