15 Words or Less: Disoriented

Wake up your poetry brains with 15 Words or Less (guidelines here)! Here’s this week’s picture:

Photo: Sandrascribbles.blogspot.com

What a great viewpoint. This picture makes me think of:

1. A creature stuck in hell, trying to get out
2. A just-buried person, wistfully looking at the sky above
3. Giant alien spiders attacking

I know. I’m too cheery for words.

Here’s my poem first draft.

When Life Turns Upside Down

Branches flail,
wail in wind.
Or are they roots,
searching for home
in the sky?

–Laura Purdie Salas

What does this image make YOU think of? Whatever enters your mind, write a quick 15 words or less poem and share it in the comments! Feel free to comment on each others’ poems and tell what your favorite part is:>)

Homeless Cat Finds Award-Winning Home

Congratulations to Lee Wardlaw and Won Ton, which just won the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award for 2011 (the announcement isn’t up on that site yet, but I swear it’s true)! What a huge and well-deserved honor.

I shared a poem or three from this charming collection here. If you haven’t already put your paws on Won Ton, now’s the time!

Storytime at the Red Balloon

Saturday morning, I spent storytime at The Red Balloon Bookshop, a wonderful indie children’s bookstore I don’t get to often enough because it’s across town. They invited me to do a storytime to help celebrate I Love to Read month. Here’s a 1:26 minute slideshow of what we did.

The kids at storytimes are generally toddlers/preschoolers, a bit young for my books. I read a poem or two from Stampede and BookSpeak, and I read the whole text of A Leaf Can Be…. I tried to bring everything to the audience’s level. We did monkey noises for the Stampede poem. We did a group poem, A Kid Can Be…, for A Leaf Can Be…. And we did the little mini-accordion book as a group for BookSpeak. Everything went pretty well, and The Red Balloon, as always, did a terrific job of setting things up.

One highlight was that someone was buying A Leaf Can Be… as I was setting up, and she had no idea I was there. An un-coerced sale–so exciting!

And they gave me a lovely thank you gift certificate to the store, so of course I had to shop. Ignoring the amount of my certificate, I picked three books, two I already know and love, and one new one:

Lemonade and Other Poems Squeezed from a Single Word

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village (I can’t lay my hands on my copy)

In the Sea (David Elliott’s brand-new companion to On the Farm and In the Wild)

Thank You and Update

A grateful thank you to all of you who commented here at WordPress or on Facebook or sent me emails offering support and encouragement about my sister JP, who (we are thinking) had a stroke last Wednesday night. She remains in a medically-induced coma in a Florida ICU. They have adjusted the respirator so that she is taking 5 breaths on her own for every 10 the respirator takes for her. The swelling of her brain is going down slowly and steadily.

Meanwhile, I’m here in Minnesota feeling useless. I’d rather go visit once she’s conscious and I can be supportive and useful to her. So I’m waiting to decide when to go down until she’s out of the coma and the doctors can make a diagnosis/prognosis. But it feels awful to just go about my daily life–doing storytimes, watching t.v., meeting writing deadlines–while she’s in ICU.

I am both grateful and guilty about the time that goes by when I’m able to forget momentarily that she’s vulnerable and helpless and struggling. It’s awful not knowing what’s going on and what the future will look like for her.

I’m going to see about starting a CaringBridge page for her, but I’ll also do very brief updates every so often here.

Poetry Friday: On a Night of Snow (Elizabeth Coatsworth)

My sister, JP, the one closest in age to me, had a medical emergency Wednesday night at work. She was rushed to the ER, where they did cranial surgery to relieve pressure. She’s in a medically-induced coma. I’m in shock. She’s in Florida, unconscious, and there’s nothing I can do. They hope to bring her out of the coma tonight or tomorrow, and then they can assess what damage the stroke or whatever it was did to her body.

Ironically, I had been reading a few poems from Good Poems for Hard Times. I think this qualifies. Here’s one of the poems I read and loved:

On a Night of Snow

Cat, if you go outdoors, you must walk in the snow.
You will come back with little white shoes on your feet,
little white shoes of snow that have heels of sleet.
Stay by the fire, my Cat. Lie still, do not go.
See how the flames are leaping and hissing low,
I will bring you a saucer of milk like a marguerite,
so white and so smooth, so spherical and so sweet–
stay with me, Cat. Outdoors the wild winds blow.

Outdoors the wild winds blow, Mistress, and dark is the night,
strange voices cry in the trees, intoning strange lore,
and more than cats move, lit by our eyes’ green light,
on silent feet where the meadow grasses hang hoar–
Mistress, there are portents abroad of magic and might,
and things that are yet to be done. Open the door!

–Elizabeth Coatsworth

Going. Staying. The choices we make all our lives. JP, stay here, by the fire.

Myra at Gathering Books has The Poetry Friday Roundup today.

15 Words or Less: Cauldron of Earth

Wake up your poetry brains with 15 Words or Less (guidelines here)! Here’s this week’s picture:

Photo: Al_HikesAZ

Wow. This is the first picture I’ve ever seen that really makes me want to go see the Grand Canyon. Gorgeous! This picture makes me think of:

1. A witch’s cauldron
2. A volcano
3. Sand castles

Here’s my poem first draft.

Grandmom

Canyon-carved

cheeks
lips
brow

Signs of weathered laughter
marked the trails of her days

–Laura Purdie Salas

What does this image make YOU think of? Whatever enters your mind, write a quick 15 words or less poem and share it in the comments! Feel free to comment on each others’ poems and tell what your favorite part is:>)

A Little Fun with Big Birthday

I’ve been corresponding with author Kate Hosford recently for an interview, and she read on my site that one of my daughters is named Annabelle. Kate immediately and generously sent Annabelle a signed copy of her picture book Big Birthday (Carolrhoda, 2012), a charming rhyming story that features a girl named Annabelle who wants an out-of-this-world birthday party (but gets a little more than she bargained for!).

I don’t think I told her that my Annabelle was 19, but I knew Annabelle would be tickled to see this book. (She still hasn’t recovered from never being able to get personalized bike license plates at tourist shops!)

So when the book arrived, Annabelle and I were having drinks and brownies and I read the picture book out loud to both of us. Fun! And even more fun? Annabelle in the book gets a red-and-white polka-dotted dress (though some tragedy befalls it!), and my Annabelle loves red-and-white polka-dotted anything!

My Annabelle in her dress for 9th-grade formal

Thanks, Kate, for a lovely read-aloud with my daughter and a new picture book for her collection. She loves signed books and was thrilled to see a kindred, polka-dotted spirit in your book. Best of luck with Big Birthday!