Today's Forecast: 2014 Pantone Poetry Project

Take out your electric blankets, everybody. The Polar Vortex has returned.

Temperature map from Foot's Forecast.

It was eleven degrees out when I went to bed last night. Ha! After this winter—when we saw the thermometer dip to 1 (yes, ONE) in January--I scoff at double digit temperatures. You call this cold?

Writerly Friends, I’m glad we have some fair-weather colors to work with today. It is Day 23 of the Pantone Poetry Project. (Read a full description of the project and how to participate here.) I think you’ll be surprised where Solar Power, Gulf Stream, and Nimbus Cloud take us.

Day 23 Solar Power
Pantone ®  13-0759

Day 23 Gulf Stream
Pantone ®  14-4511

Day 23 Nimbus Cloud
Pantone ®  13-4108

Poet Patricia VanAmburg often draws from the well of mythology, one of her areas of expertise, for her poems. Patricia is a professor at Howard Community College and has traveled with students to Athens and Crete.

Persephone holding patera.

Seduction

by Patricia VanAmburg

Nimble Nimbus—even when you are not

cumulus as could be—you hold enough

moisture to force Persephone’s bloom.

Patricia and I were surprised to find that both of us found the word “nimble” in our cloud poems. As I was researching the etymology of the words “nimble” and “nimbus,” I happened to find the news story that inspired my Nimbus Cloud poem.

Snow on Mars

By Laura Shovan

A laser instrument designed to gather knowledge of how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars has detected snow from clouds about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) above the spacecraft’s landing site. www.nasa.gov 9/29/08

The air is on Mars is quick to seize each flake.

Snow sublimes before it touches down

on red soil. Am I nimble enough

to comprehend the thought?

Snow on Mars: a dusting, white

as the puffs of snow that fell

yesterday morning. I was home,

watched light footed snow

fill the sky, the trees. Nimbus

from nabu, the Sanskrit word

for sky. Even on other worlds,

nimbus clouds are darker, dense

with water. They hang low

in the Martian sky, round as apples,

waiting for our grasp.

Diane Mayr of Random Noodling turns our attention to the sun with her take on the color Solar Power.

Riddle

by Diane Mayr

You might say

his daily trip from

east to west is

all in his head.

Answer: Sunflower 

Got a poem or response to today’s colors? Feeling sorry for Gulf Stream (it got no attention today)? There’s still time to add a poem or sketch. Put your written response to one of our colors in the comments. I’ll add it by the end of the day.

UPDATE: Thanks to Linda Baie, we now have a poem for Gulf Stream. (Actually, Linda included all three colors in her four-line poem.)

The nursery painting
by Linda Baie

The brush sweeps a nimbus cloud
over the gulf stream sky
with the solar powered smile.
The boy whispers, “it’s raining.”

Linda Baie ©All Rights Reserved

And one more Solar (Flower) Power, from Margaret Simon:

Spring comes

dressed in sunflower yellow
with a bow 
of golden glow. 

Margaret reports: "My students told me I hit the jackpot with 'golden glow.'" That was one of our inspiration colors on Day 10. You can read the poems  here.

We've got two food/flower-related colors for tomorrow, Day 24. I hope you'll come up with a Sweet Pea of a poem for Poetry Friday.

Day 24 Sweet Pea
Pantone ®  15-0531

Day 24 Orange Ochre
Pantone ®  16-1253

I'm already seeing Tiger Lillies...

Photo by J. Shovan

Poetry Friday: I Open a Box

Writerly Friends, it's cold outside.

Come in out of the cold. There's
a poetry party going on at Tara's place!
Join the Poetry Friday blog roll
at A Teaching Life.
Photo: Times Union

All this talk about the Polar Vortex makes me think of this guy:

It is six degrees in Maryland right now. Last week we actually hit ONE. Not one degree below Fahrenheit. Just ONE. 

It's been a good time for writing, baking, making soup, and cleaning. I've got boxes of papers left unopened since we moved here 14 years ago. In one of them, I found a You Will Survive High School letter from the boyfriend who, many years later, became my husband. I found a card from my grandmother, who died in 2003. All my love for her floods back when I see her handwriting. 

The process of clearing out old letters, boxes, and photos makes a powerful writing prompt. It's the surprises to be found--a picture of a childhood friend, a Mother's Day drawing made by your young son (who's about to graduate from high school)--that make strong poems. Rediscovering forgotten objects can trigger memories and family stories, as one does in today's poem.

This week, I'm sharing Maria Mazziotti Gillan's poem "I Open a Box." It was recently published by the online journal Narrative Northeast.

I Open a Box

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

...and find inside a picture,

of myself as a child, sitting

on a small chair, wearing overalls

and shoes that must have been

hand-me-downs because they are

so worn the sole is coming loose.

I am no more than 18 months

old and cannot have been walking

all that long. I am squinting

into the sun, my nose crinkling

with effort the way it crinkles now

when I am trying to see in bright light.

Behind me, the six family tenement

where I was born on 5th Avenue

in Paterson, the rickety stairs rise up

three floors, the porches tilt a bit

as though they might fall off

if someone were to jump on them

too hard. My mother delivered

me herself in this coldwater flat.

The doctor didn't get to her in time...

Read the rest at Narrative Northeast.

Maria was my first serious poetry teacher. If you don't know her work, you are in for a journey. She is one of our country's most important writers on the immigrant experience.

Postcard of Paterson, NJ at Card Cow.
William Carlos Williams wrote about
Paterson's Great Falls in his book, Paterson.