Poetry Friday October 18, 2019

Poetry Friday is hosted today Jama at Jama's Alphabet Soup. Jama is an "author, blogger, foodie, alphabet lover, picture book nerd, soup maker, bear collector, diehard anglophile and secret wife of Colin Firth." (That's taken from her blog.) I am lucky to be Jama's facebook friend. Each day my feed is filled with gorgeous illustrations from modern and classic picture books. Today Jama is sharing snippets of poetry from Charles Ghigna’s new book,  Dear Poet: Notes to a Young Writer. Go on over and take note of the stunning illustrations created by his son. Don't forget to check out the links to other participants sharing poetry today.

I had a post ready to go last Friday with Catherine Flynn at Reading to the Core, except for needing a final check and to add details about her post. I woke and went looking for my laptop to do just that. It wasn't where I usually leave it. I searched all over our living room for it. It wasn't under any of our furniture. It wasn't snugly tucked into our book shelves. I even checked the grandchildren's toy shelves. No laptop. I ransacked the rest of the house. No laptop. Being more than halfway convinced that it had been stolen, I phoned Apple and they helped me lock it so all my stuff was safe.

As we were planning on leaving town, I gave up and started to pack. My favourite sweatshirt wasn't in the closet so I went to the hamper of folded laundry that I still hadn't put away. There in the middle of the basket under folded clothes was my laptop. By then I had run out of time, so I'm sharing last week's post today. A friend of mine suggested my computer had gone searching for missing socks. Another that maybe the hard drive wanted cleaning. Catherine focused on gratitude last week. I'm very grateful to have found my laptop.

A couple of weeks ago Catherine and her Swagger friends showed off their zenos. She explained, "invented by J. Patrick Lewis, a zeno is a ten line form with a 8-4-2-1-4-2-1-4-2-1 syllable sequence an abcdefdghd rhyme scheme." Having a penchant for patterns in mathematics, I couldn't resist having a go. I played around with this format off and on. It is much harder than I expected! At first I ended up having too many 4-2-1 sequences. I gave up and figured I'd use them all because I couldn't decide which one to abandon. The good thing about missing posting last Friday is that when I looked at it this week, the words just came together to make the whole poem work.

M's Quilt

here stitched with love is Marguerite's quilt
patterns dance in
white and
red
spinning centre
braided
edge
gracing now an 
empty
bed

I made this quilt for my mother in law who died a number of years ago. My partner and I inherited the house and contents so the quilt has come back to me.