Friday's Poetica Miscellanea

My poem, "In Mountains", is on Silver Birch Press.  I hope you can stop by!   The poem is written for the theme "Me in Fiction".  I chose Heidi as my character.  You MUST remember her!  I'd bet most of you have read "Heidi".  Oh, I so loved that book - well, those books, really!  I also read the next two: "Heidi Grows Up" and "Heidi's Children", when I was young.  Most people are probably not familiar with those two books.  They were written by Spyri's French translator, Charles Tritten.  I felt like I had discovered a secret world in the mountains, and then to top it off, discovered secret books.  Until doing a search on Amazon, I had never, since childhood, heard of those two books about Heidi's older years.

After reading Heidi, I wanted to eat goat cheese and hardy home-baked breads, and drink goat milk and look up at the night sky through an open window above my hay stuffed mattress.  It sounded wonderful and wild!

I'd love some comments there...just to show them that someone does, in fact, read the poems on their site!

And now, I just have to share this picture and poem:
Last year, for Christmas, I got my husband a yellow lab pup, Ginger.  And this year, I painted her portrait.  I hadn't expected it to come out, so I hadn't put it on a standard sized piece of paper.  It was supposed to be practice.  My first picture was awful and overworked.  This one I tried to do quickly and without much preamble - grab a piece of watercolor paper, a brush, three colors and water.  Don't draw.  Just paint.  Don't think.  Just do.
I was kinda floored when I did it.  Is it a Rembrandt?  No.  But I'm okay with that. I was still pretty pleased with my watercolor - it's the first one that I've actually signed.  Hopefully I will improve with age and practice.  But for now, I do like how Ginger's portrait came out.

The finishing touch to my husband's gift was having it framed.  I ordered the frame custom made by Art to Frame on line!  It's looks so "finished" now.  You pick the frame material, the matte color, or colors if you do a double mat.  Tell them the inside dimensions you need for the mat, and they do the rest.  It comes all sized just right for your picture to be placed inside.  Oh, and you pick plain glass, non-glare finish, or plexiglass.  Another offering they have is for you to send them an image or images digitally to be framed or put on canvas.  Lots of options for art online nowadays!

Here's a "happy haiku with a reverso ending" poem for Ginger... like maybe we could call it a Semi-reversoku...

Ginger

Warm, brown eyes watch you,

Studying body language,

Waiting for your smile;

Her tongue smile-licks back,

Tail perpetual motion,

Her body electrified -

Wanting to please you,

But the happy always wins!

Joyous is a dog

 Waiting for your smile.

Studying body language,

Warm, brown eyes watch you.

Donna JT Smith, Jan 13, 2016

So I DID finally put a poem up here.  And now for more poetry, it would behoove (or is that "beehive"?) you to head on over to visit Keri's at Keri Recommends for the Poetry Friday Roundup!