New Poems for National Poetry Month

Like the swallows of Capistrano, National Poetry Month has returned, along with this spring's flowers, showers, and long evening hours. Springtime and poetry go together like daffodils and sunlight. Robert Frost wrote of spring in A Prayer in Springtime (Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today…), as did William Shakespeare in the poem Spring, (When daisies pied, and violets blue, And lady-smocks all silver-white, and cuckoo-buds of yellow hue do paint the meadows with delight…). Many other top notch poets have waxed poetically of spring, too.

I have never written a springtime poem, but then again I am not a “real” poet, merely a clever rhymer with an odd sense of humor and occasional flashes of insight. At the moment, I have little time for even witty word play, but I did want to contribute something for National Poetry Month, and so I dug though my computer files and found a number of kid poems that didn’t make it into my 2010 children’s poetry book, The Delicious Chocolate Donut (And Other Off-Kilter Poems). When I read the poems, I could see why they didn’t make it. Suffering from weak rhymes, clunky rhythms, and subject matter too weird for popular consumption, these poor poems were analogous to the Charlie-in-the-Box and the Spotted Elephant on the Isle of Misfit Toys.

​Upon second thought, though, a few poems seemed worthy of something more than perpetual banishment in the “unused” folder of my digital filing cabinet. And because spring is a season of rebirth and renewal, I figured, hey, why not uncover a few of them, give them a little light and love and polish, and put them up on the blog? So here they are, giving regular readers of this blog (are there any out there?) a break from my usual spelling posts and providing teachers looking for weird, off-kilter poems with those very things.

Feel free to copy and use them in any way you want. You can also download a PDF of the four poems from the file cabinet of this web site. Creatively labeled “Four New Poems,” they’re sitting in the right hand column at the top.

A brief word of explanation about the poems is in order. The first was inspired by Sundays dinners cooked by my mother-in-law, Betty Good. For years and years, almost every Sunday, Betty (a home economics teacher) prepared a delicious and extensive old school Sunday dinner (not supper) for her family, consisting of meat (often turkey), potatoes, gravy, two or three vegetables from the garden, rolls, salad, and dessert (typically cake and/or pie and/or ice cream). I have very fond memories of those dinners. This poem is written for two or more voices, which kids love to read and teachers love to have on hand. The second poem for little ones and is meant to be accompanied by lots of motion and activity. The third poem is simply odd, as is the fourth and last poem, which features a fun illustration by Mike Owens, the talented illustrator/animator who illustrated my Delicious Chocolate Donut collection.