Check It Out

My goal this school year has been to update an aging poetry collection( average age 1986).  The orders have been placed.  It is similar to Christmas to see the orders arrive.

This week, I received two poetry books, If Not for the Cat by Jack Prelutsky and Least Things by Jane Yolen.  Both are haiku. 

I facilitate an after-school young poets group of first -fourth graders.  We are working on haiku and the fibonacci poetry.  They were the first to hear and see these two new collections.  Lots of “oohing and ahhing” over the photos (taken by Jason Stemple, her son) that correspond with Yolen’s haiku and again at the always amazing artwork of Ted Rand in the Prelutsky book.

And then it happened, the connection between the two books.  The students and I discovered that each writer had a haiku of the same creature.  We delighted in looking at the two haiku side by side. 

I, the hoverer,
Sip the nasturtium’s nectar
And sing with my wings.
–Prelutsky

Do hummingbirds dream
Of soaring on eagle wings?
Just for a moment.
–Yolen

Safe inside my pouch
Sleeps the future of my kind–
Delicate and frail.
–Prelutsky

We walk hand in hand,
My fingers signaling trust,
Yours telling me love.
–Yolen
(We loved how although Prelutsky is speaking of a joey and Yolen of her granddaughter, that they do go together.)

And finally,

Wingless we went in,
But emerged as fliers–
And oh, such colors.
–Prelutsky

Can you paint a psalm?
Can you wallpaper a dream?
I can–with my wings.
–Yolen

Following the discussion, the young poets set off to write their own poetry about animals or as Yolen referred to them ‘least things”, taken from the following quote:

“Nature excels in the least things”–Pliny the Elder

Happy Reading,
MsMac