Dance-off #4

I just love him.

Gardening

I have nothing new to tell or offer you today, or not just now at least. I do, however, have a question: How do I start a garden? It is getting to that time of the year, and I have no idea what to plant or when or how to take care of it or ANYTHING. I live in southwestern Colorado; other than that, I can't tell you about the dirt. Our backyard is freakin' tiny and faces West, so it really only gets half-day sun. The only things I really want are a couple of tomato plants and some herbs like rosemary, mint, and basil. Other than that... things that are easy to grow/hard to kill, yummy, and won't really make much more than two people can eat and/or freeze. (I'm don't want to can stuff.)

Help! If you have any good blogs or websites to recommend, or just plain ol' advice for a first-time gardener, please leave comments here!

I wrote a poem

So, clearly the "poem a day" thing didn't last too long here. I went back and tagged the early posts with "poetry" in addition to "poem a day," as well as the successive randomly-posted poems, too. Poems by other people are tagged as "guest poets."

Here is one I wrote for my class of 7th-graders for our Africa unit. They've read and researched about some pretty hardcore stuff, both on the internet and in books, and in poem form. I consciously included specific figurative language like similes, onomatapoeia, and sensory detail; also, I used some different line breaks and punctuation to show them the possibilities for writing poetry are nearly endless.

Famine

My tongue is swollen,
my throat as dry as the desert all around me.
When there is water to drink
in careful, slow drips,
it only makes my insides twist and cramp
until I hurt too much
to even cry.

I am small,
too small to fight for food.
Other children, bigger children, shout and push and
scramble to pick
specks
of
grain
out
of
dung,
or a flaky tree root
from the earth,
(earth: Mother,
betrayer)
and gobble them down.
I only watch and wither away,
my belly growing bigger each day.

My parents: dead.
no prayers or spells
or medicine
(if we could buy it)
could have saved them.
My sister: dead.
I carried her everywhere,
her little legs too tiny,
like dried twigs,
to walk.
One day her rattling breath stopped, and
I put her down
and didn't look back.

What would have been the point?

I am a bubble on the surface
of a cup
of water,
dirty and sickly.
A bubble too small
and insignificant
to notice.
I live only a moment,
then

POP

I am gone.

Dance-off #3

From Shall We Dance?



Love it, love it! Less impressive dancing (but way more impressive costuming--the feathers!) here in Top Hat, one of my favorite musical songs from one of my favorite musicals.