30 Poets/One Day

April was a great poetry month here at Gottabook (I say with bias but also factually). How great? Here's what showed up during 30 Poets/30 Days:

Douglas Florian - Bigfoot
April Halprin Wayland - Tender
Charles Waters - Watery Blue Ceiling
Carmen T. Bernier-Grand - La Alancia
David L. Harrison - Toothy Grin (Kit Fox)
Adam Rex - 47
Jane Yolen - Escaping Bonn
Charles Ghigna - Be Still
Kenn Nesbitt - Dizzy Dottie's Dog Salon
Liz Garton Scanlon - Look Around
Bob Raczka - Squirrel
Ellen Hopkins - Country Kids Exist on Their Own Planet
Lee Bennett Hopkins - Spring
Rebecca Kai Dotlich - Missing
Linda Sue Park - School Days: Spring 2020
Calef Brown - Dream
Marilyn Singer - Natural Disasters
Ann Whitford Paul - Too Big For Bear
Janet Wong - Look for Birds
Julie Larios - What Did I See?
Brod Bagert - When I'm Old & Gray
Kristine O'Connell George - Seagull Comments
Kathi Appelt - Quarantine
Nancy Bo Flood - Go Fish
Darren Sardelli - Our Teacher Was the Greatest
Georgia Heard - A Quivering of Wings
Ed DeCaria - Another school dream (this time with a spider)
Bruce Balan - The Poem I Would Write
Nikki Grimes - Unvarnished Healing
Greg Pincus - Still

Yup. A great month. Again, I thank all the poets, Bonnie Adamson for the logos, and all of you for reading along (and for comments, emails, and tweets too!). This was the sixth edition of 30 Poets/30 Days, with a multi-year gap between the fifth and this one. Will there be a seventh? It's too early to say... but I do know we always need poetry wherever we can find it.

(Speaking of which... it's Poetry Friday once again, and you can find the roundup of all participating bloggers over at Elizabeth Steinglass's Poetry for Children and Their Grownups. There's a new roundup weekly, so you can find poetry when you need it.)

I have no idea what blogging will happen here moving forward, but it was fun to dust this place off. Until the next time... onward!

Greg Pincus - Still

STILL

by Greg Pincus

We still our cities, still our schools.

We still and watch with shock.

We still our bodies, still our minds.

We still… and we take stock.

We still have earth beneath our feet.

We still have sky above.

We still have art and friends and joy.

We still have hope and love.

We feel the world still spinning round -

Each night still yields to day.

We still don’t know the path ahead….

Still - we’ll find our way.

©Greg Pincus. All rights reserved.

Today's poem wraps up this year's edition of 30 Poets/30 Days. I offer up another big thank you to Bonnie Adamson for making me two logos when I plaintively asked for help. And of course, I give a huge thank you to the poets who joined in this year on the spur of the moment. 

Finally, I thank all y'all who've read along and shared the poetry with others. This definitely seemed to me like a year for poetry, and I'm glad to know that others felt so, too. Poetry is a good thing. We need good things now... and always.

Onward!

Nikki Grimes - Unvarnished Healing

Unvarnished Healing 

John 9:1-41 

by Nikki Grimes

There are those who insist 

gifts of speaking in tongues 

and heavenly healing 

belong to yesteryear, 

when Holy Spirit movement stories 

flowed from that old time religion. 

But were those mighty works of God 

merely once-upon-a-time? 

According to John, Jesus spoke of 

the "we" of this work, 

a ministry calling 

with no timelines, deadlines, 

or time limits implied. 

I heal, you heal, he/she/we heal 

whenever God moves through 

prayer and the laying on of hands, 

this work perfectly modeled 

by the Perfect One, himself 

on a particular Sabbath, when his mercy 

settled on a man sightless from birth. 

Curious, how the disciples' 

very first thoughts turned to 

whose sin was to blame for this blindness, 

while some Pharisees rebuked this rule-breaker rabbi 

for daring to work on the Sabbath. 

Which are we? 

Disciples or Pharisees? 

Will judgment cause us 

to miss the miracle? 

We are called to enter into 

all of God's good work, 

and to worship him with praise 

for his unvarnished healing.

©Nikki Grimes. All rights reserved.

I don't know that there's anyone who smiths words the way Nikki Grimes does. She will knock your socks off, no matter what she writes. Like the above poem or One Last Word, her book which uses the Golden Shovel form (and if you wanna know more about that form/write one yourself, here's the poet herself to tell you all about it).

 

Or beyond that, I predict you'll be dazzled if you read any of her broad range of books... like her award winning memoir, Ordinary Hazards (which got both a Printz and a Siebert Honor nod from the ALA). 

And if her current lineup of books isn't enough... look at what she's got coming down the pike this year alone - Southwest Sunrise in May and Kamala Harris: Rooted in Justice coming out in August. I mean, come on now. She will knock your socks off in so many ways that you'll be sockless all year... and you'll be glad of it, I say.

Bruce Balan - The Poem I Would Write

THE POEM I WOULD WRITE

The poem I would write if

I remembered it

would be about

you

It was there this morning

in the grey light it snuck in under

the barely-open hatch

finding me beneath the covers

finding me enough to turn me in my sleep

push my dream aside

so that I thought

– while groggy as the slow roll of the boat --

this will be my poem for today

It will be about

you

And there it was

my poem about you:  

beautiful and poetic

succinct with a knowing depth

We shared our moment

the poem and I

until, content in my new knowledge

I pulled the covers up

went back to sleep

while the poem

laughing at my folly

slipped out of the hatch

and ran away

across the sea.

© Bruce Balan. All rights reserved.

I'm excited to have Bruce Balan here at 30 Poets/30 Days this year. And... oh, yes! A poem about poems. And a doozy, at that because, of course, it's about more than a poem....

A little backstory here, in the poet's own words: "April Halprin Wayland and I have been writing a poem every day and sharing it with each other since 2012. Thus, every day I am looking for a new poem. Sometimes they find me without my looking, but I have to make sure to pay attention or, as usually happens, they will give up on me.

This one was written while anchored at Isla Maria Cleofas about 50 miles off the Pacific coast of Mexico."

Amazingly, this post was written from the same place!!! (Well, at least in my mind.... I am anchored at my desk, truth be told. But still, I can close my eyes and run away across the sea, too.)

Ed DeCaria - Another school dream (this time with a spider)

Another school dream (this time with a spider) 

I 

drop 

into a dream — 

    down 

    through my 

    classroom ceiling 

    and land 

         plop! 

    in my 

    moonlit 

    chair. 

    I 

    stare 

    at my 

    fingers 

         tracing 

            forever ago 

         scratches 

             in my 

         desk. 

    I lean forward, 

         touch 

             nose 

             to wood 

         and breathe 

    then bend back 

        to 

    peek inside 

        my cubby. 

       A young spider spots me, 

             crawls to a corner, and 

              curls into 

                  nothing, 

             just as she was taught. 

                  I wave a little pinky-wave — 

and wake up 

smiling.

©Ed DeCaria. All rights reserved. 

It's a pleasure for me to have Ed DeCaria here at 30 Poets/30 Days. Some of you here might know Ed from his amazing Madness Poetry event, where he works behind the scenes to throw an annual poetry event that is extraordinary (and a blast). 

And some of you might know him from StorySeer - which you totally need to check out if you are at all interested in author visits. Seriously. Go hence!

And those are two great reasons to know Ed DeCaria. But you also need to know him as a poet since he is one. And cuz the rule of threes. So, read, click links, and on we go...