This month we are doing Word Play poems.
Laura shared this form with us after she enjoyed it on Today's Little Ditty last spring.
Check out Nikki Grimes' description here.
The idea is to explore a word: what it sounds like, what it means to you, what it implies.
This was a fun one for me once I started thinking about my kitchen.
Kitchen is a Choppy Word
Kitchen is a choppy word.
Hard “K” to start us off eager and excited,
a voiceless stop consonant middle, then
no nonsense end, a closed syllable schwa blend.
My kitchen is all that -
a room enclosed in warmth,
bright with humming and dancing,
or hungry childish crying.
When the only phone hung
by the kitchen door
we scribbled phone numbers
in pencil on cheerful yellow walls.
My kitchen is full of ghosts I love.
It has wrung with curses, been
bright red with blood splatter, and often
smelt of burning bacon.
My kitchen is a small square space;
a triangle of hot, cold, and sharp.
Gushing water, cracking ice, boiling pots,
flowing or frozen or forgotten.
Favorite coffee mugs mix and match with
tea cups bought in tourist shops.
Hope chest flatware shuffle with discount spoons;
mom’s china and thrift store plates.
There are rainbow prisms in the window,
dog dishes by the door,
tripping hazard cats curled up on the rag rug,
and a light left on all night.
- Andromeda Jazmon
Visit my Poetry Sisters' blogs to read their poems:
And make sure to find time to visit the Friday Poetry Round up by Linda at TeacherDance. Enjoy!
Poetry Peeps! You're invited to join our challenge for the month of November! Here's the scoop: We're writing an Ode to Autumn. An ode is a lyrical poem, and like the ancient Greeks, modern humans also enjoy marking an occasion with a song. Whether you choose an irregular ode with no set pattern or rhyme, or the ten-line, three-to-five stanza famed by Homer himself, we hope you'll join us in singing in the season of leaf-fall and pie. Are you in? Good! You’ve got a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering with the rest of us on November 26th (the Friday after Thanksgiving, so plan ahead) in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals.
