Poetry Gifts from Kat

How surprised was I when I found in my email that my Aussie poet-author friend, Kathryn Apel, brought greetings and a summer poetry swap gift.  She told me that she wanted to write a solage and an epigram for me since I've said a number of times that I found them tricky during the Poetry Pep Up Challenge. "The trimeric was so much fun, picking lines from poems on your blog. I had only intended to take lines for the first stanza - which repeats through the poem. But then I stumbled on the last line, and couldn’t bear to leave it out. And then, I decided a title from you would be lovely, too… And in the end, I wrote very little!"  In truth, Kat displayed her creative, artistic side and wrote a beautiful epigram and trimeric in the same poem and picture. This is her "first foray into flower watercolour" and it is beautiful. I am including it in my Nature Nurtures 2020 Gallery.

This field of flowers is a lovely present that exhibits a truth.

Kat and I are linked-friends. I am deeply grateful to her for her poetry gifts.

Thank you, Tabatha Yeatts, for organizing the 20202 Summer Poetry Swap.

While teaching my first online graduate course for teachers, Kat sent me her poems. Deeply entrenched into sharing curriculum models for sparking wonder, curiosity, and creativity in learners, I found another pandemic poem that resonated with me. I took two lines from the poem and created a golden shovel poem to send Kat. Day 5 of her Poetry Pep Up asked for a golden shovel poem. I already sent Kat one but when I read the following poem, I was drawn to two lines.

Strike lines from Kitty O'Meara's poem: And the people stayed home (stanza 1) the earth began to heal  (stanza 2)

We started each day with sadness and

ended with prayers of hope for the

grieving world and its fallen people.

We kept our distance and stayed

in. Routines brought sanity. Home

became the center of life in the

early days of COVID.  When earth

needed a gentle cradling, people began

reconnecting and reimagining ways to

find balance and pathways to heal.

©CV, 2020

Because of the rigor of the workload preparing for and teaching my summer graduate poem, I am offering my post to my friend, poet-librarian Linda Mitchell, the host of Poetry Friday. Linda has an original poem freshly written for the 4th of July holiday. She is also sharing her poetry swap gift from another poet-author-teacher friend, Margaret Simon. Join me at the Poetry Friday Roundup here to find more poetic goodness.