Mainely Write

Our little Christmas tree from our motel Christmas!  Our inside and outside Christmas trees.  Good ole' Spiny Pine is finally big enough to wear Christmas lights! Merry Christmas, all! Were you able to see the full moon tonight?  It won't happen again for over 30 years.  It was so foggy and rainy today that I was sure we would not be able to see it, but just after midnight, when I turned out the lights, I noticed light streaming in my windows.  Sure enough, the fog had lifted and the moon was out big and bright! I'm posting my Christmas card poem and watercolor today.  I made my cards this year.  I was late - very late - getting them out, but it was fun! It's Poetry Friday, hosted by Irene Latham at Live Your Poem , where she has been posting The Twelve Days of Kindness!  Her recap is there today to enjoy! Today for Poetry Friday, I post my Christmas card to you! I also want to direct you to Silver Birch Press , where my poem " Christmas Storm

Silver Birch Express now has my poem " Christmas Storm " published on their site.  You can find it here .  It is a Christmas Eve poem, inspired by a trip back to Maine via Amtrak on Christmas in 1983. As a young couple, we lived in Minnesota for a while, so had to make trips to Maine after our children were born to see grandparents in Maine. After our train trip at Christmas in 1983, we decided to move back East to make the trips less eventful. This was the longest trip ever with two little kids (an eight-month-old and a three-year-old old) on a train iced to a halt a few times and going in reverse at others. Had to inch along because frozen tracks can crack and it was frightfully cold out — well below zero. Bathrooms stopped working having frozen up. All trains were cancelled when we got to Chicago, so we ended up between homes not knowing when we would be continuing on the journey. But we had the best time in Union Station on Christmas Eve sharing Christmas

It is Poetry Friday and I am pleased to be sharing a poem by Dori Bennett that she sent to me for this year's Winter Poetry Swap - thunk up and organized by the awesome Tabatha Yeatts . Dori's gift of poem and star locket arrived on Wednesday morning, and worked to further boost my resolve and faith on a day-slash-week that needed girding.   How could she have known that the timing and words would be just right?  Perhaps she couldn't.  But I know that God did. The poem was a combination of snippets from my known life through the blog, and projections or assumptions correctly and thoughtfully applied in words.  As I read it, I could recognize things that I'd written about, or was that thought about?  I could not remember having written about some things, but felt the familiarity of the words somehow in Dori's writing. The poem took my breath away...and brought a few tears! And then there was the gift - though if the only thing in the envelope was the poem,

It is Poetry Friday, and this post COULD have been done LAST Friday, but I had turkeys on my brain.  I'm calling it a fowl.  And I promise I will be better at getting to more poetry posters.  Seems like lately I'm being pulled in so many directions that it would be easier and more relaxing to go back to work! I was so excited LAST Friday: I had THREE pieces on other sites.  Two were on Spark27 .  I responded to two pieces supplied by other people.  One piece was a photo to which I responded with a poem, and the other was a written biographical piece to which I responded using my new watercolor skills. The third was a poem accepted by Silver Birch Press, my second poem accepted for online publication with them! 1. Get Sparked - Percolated Date - photo was taken by Alisa Laska and was my "inspiration piece" for my poem. Go there to see her photo. 2. Get Sparked - Pankha-wala - written by Urmilla Khanna was my inspiration piece for my watercolor of their servant

Noah sees the turkeys.  Noah would like me to bring one inside. Last Friday, I wrote about the coyotes, owls and moon because I finally remembered what my idea was.  Oddly enough, that was the day after Thanksgiving, and I saw a whole herd of terkies lerking on my lawn...(spell check isn't liking that!) and could have written about that. I was messing about with the turkey idea, and the old jump rope jingle came to mind... so I wrote - a turkey poem called Turkey Ramblings. Hard to see the turkeys when the camera wants to focus on the screen! The turkeys are always fun to watch.  They just eat their way across the lawn.  Occasionally a tom will stop to ruffle his feathers and look huge in case some cute young hen is looking his way.   On this day it was raining, so feathers were getting pretty damp. They all took turns ruffling to get the raindrops off. They are all on guard, and will stop to take a look around while they are eating, to see if any danger is eminent

The route to a poem is always intriguing to me.  I hate to lose the process.  The interesting thing with composing on a computer, is that you can save iterations of a poem.  I often copy and paste a whole poem as a copy before editing it - just in case I want to revert or just in case it gets to be so far removed from the beginnings that I want to see.  It's kind of like looking out the car window to see where you are going.  Or better yet, taking snapshots along your route.  The trip is always a part of the adventure for me...if you can call a poem an adventure.  Hey, maybe that's another post! Researching where you are going Jotting notes about what you want to do when you get there Sitting back and enjoying the time Take out stuff you thought would be fun, when you discover something funner to do with your time and efforts *Special Note:  The above post was not intended to be a final copy!  I was taking notes so that I'd have something to go on for today... Then