poetry friday

all we are saying is give peeps a chance

~ jama ~ 40 Comments
“Peeps” by Leigh-Anne Eagerton (oil on panel).
PEEPS 
by Judy Fort Brenneman

If Peeps are in the store, can Spring be far behind?
My hand, reverent, traces the crackle of cellophane
That shelters conjoined confections.
Soft shapes in bright colors—
Yellow, pink, and this year, blue—
(Yellow is the best, anyone could tell you.)
Colors of spring more true than the purple crocus
Frozen in its bulb under the snowbank at the end of the drive.

My hand plucks them like seed packets.
One, two, three four five.
Odd numbers are best—no one notices
If you eat the odd one before you get home.

The register beeps the red total.
The clerk says leave them out overnight
In the open, without cellophane;
That's the best way, she smiles.
I smile back; who am I to tell her she's wrong?
Naked Peeps are soon as hard and dry as sun-baked dirt
At the end of August.

My five small packs nestle in the sack
Like boxes of tulips minus the stems.
My thumb punches through the cellophane of the one on top—
Better than any groundhog's shadow,
More pure than the first robin's song,
A promise of pollen shakes loose with sugar spilled on my lap.
I pull the yellow blossoms apart,
And eat Spring.

~ Copyright © 2023 Judy Fort Brenneman as posted at Your Daily Poem.

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“The Scream” by Lisa Johnson.

The thing about Peeps is that you either love ’em or hate ’em. Kind of like candy corn at Halloween, Peeps are undoubtedly divisive.

Made of sugar, corn syrup, gelatin, food coloring, carnauba wax and a preservative, Peeps aren’t exactly the healthiest treat. Yet for many of us, it’s all about the nostalgia — memories of childhood Easter baskets, debating over which color or shape is best, whether to eat them fresh or stale.

What can I say? I’ve always liked marshmallow: chocolate covered marshmallow bunnies, mini mallows in cocoa, s’mores. ‘Nuff (or should I say ‘fluff’) said. 😀

“L.L. Peep” by the Vogt Family.

Yes, eating straight sugar is bad, but once a year, I don’t mind throwing caution to the wind. Note I said “once a year,” because those orange Halloween pumpkin Peeps or green Christmas tree ones are just wrong. Everyone knows Halloween = chocolate, and Christmas = cookies. Right? Some things, after all, are sacred.

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[perky review] Taxi, Go! by Patricia Toht and Maria Karipidou

~ jama ~ 13 Comments

Good Morning! It’s a brand new day, and everybody in the city has something to do, somewhere to go. Who will help them get there?

Speedy, spunky TAXI, that’s who!

Look, here he is now 😀.

Cabs are resting in a line.
Wake up, Taxi. Rise and shine!
Fill the tank, Check the tires.
Roof light on — now for hire!

Taxi . . . GO!
Get on your way —
today will be a busy day!

In Taxi, Go!, a zippy new rhyming picture book by Patricia Toht and Maria Karipidou (Candlewick, 2024), we follow spiffy red Taxi from morning till night as he transports passengers young and old to a variety of destinations.

After his morning fuel-up, he first picks up a woman who can’t be late for an important business date. Taxi races ahead, weaving left and right through an alley-way as “Heavy rain comes crashing down.” When sirens wail, Taxi has to STOP! for an emergency rescue (cat up a tree).

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“My Mother’s Colander” by Dorianne Laux

~ jama ~ 42 Comments
“Christmas Morning” by June Webster (oil on canvas).
MY MOTHER'S COLANDER
by Dorianne Laux

Holes in the shape of stars
punched in gray tin, dented,
cheap, beaten by each
of her children with a wooden spoon.

Noodle catcher, spaghetti stopper,
pouring cloudy rain into the sink,
swirling counter clockwise
down the drain, starch slime
on the backside, caught
in the piercings.

Scrubbed for sixty years, packed
and unpacked, the baby’s
helmet during the cold war,
a sinking ship in the bathtub,
little boat of holes.

Dirt scooped in with a plastic
shovel, sifted to make cakes
and castles. Wrestled
from each other’s hands,
its tin feet bent and re-bent.

Bowl daylight fell through
onto freckled faces, noon stars
on the pavement, the universe
we circled aiming jagged stones,
rung bells it caught and held.

~ from Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019)
“Morning Light” by June Webster (oil on canvas).

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Wendy Cope: letter perfect

~ jama ~ 27 Comments
“Woman Writing Letter at Desk” by Henry Clive (ca. 1940s).
EXCHANGE OF LETTERS
by Wendy Cope

'Man who is a serious novel would like to hear from a woman who is a poem' (classified advertisement, New York Review of Books).

Dear Serious Novel,

I am a terse assured lyric with impeccable rhythmic flow, some apt and original metaphors, and a music that is all my own. Some people say I am beautiful.

My vital statistics are eighteen lines, divided into three-line stanzas, with an average of four words per line.

My first husband was a cheap romance; the second was Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanac. Most of the men I meet nowadays are autobiographies, but a substantial minority are books about photography or trains.

I have always hoped for a relationship with an upmarket work of fiction. Please write and tell me more about yourself.

         Yours intensely,
         Song of the First Snowdrop

Dear Song of the First Snowdrop,

Many thanks for your letter. You sound like just the kind of poem I am hoping to find. I’ve always preferred short, lyrical women to the kind who go on for page after page.

I am an important 150,000 word comment on the dreams and dilemmas of twentieth-century Man. It took six years to attain my present weight and stature but all the twenty-seven publishers I have so far approached have failed to understand me. I have my share of sex and violence and a very good joke in chapter nine, but to no avail. I am sustained by the belief that I am ahead of my time.

Let’s meet as soon as possible. I am longing for you to read me from cover to cover and get to know my every word.

         Yours impatiently,
         Death of the Zeitgeist

~ from Serious Concerns (Faber and Faber, 1992)

“Writing a Letter” by Roeland Kneepkens (2013).
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[poem + recipe] swoon and croon for macaroons

~ jama ~ 36 Comments

Fancy a macaroon?

American Fireside Poet James Russell Lowell elevates a humble cookie to romantic delectability in his amusing recipe poem. I wish Eleanor would make some of her macaroons for my birthday. 🙂

Chromolithograph after a drawing by Hugo Bürkner (1878).
ELEANOR MAKES MACAROONS
by James Russell Lowell

Light of triumph in her eyes,
Eleanor her apron ties;
As she pushes back her sleeves,
High resolve her bosom heaves.
Hasten, cook! impel the fire
To the pace of her desire;
As you hope to save your soul,
Bring a virgin casserole,
Brightest bring of silver spoons,—
Eleanor makes macaroons!

Almond-blossoms, now adance
In the smile of Southern France,
Leave your sport with sun and breeze,
Think of duty, not of ease;
Fashion, ’neath their jerkins brown,
Kernels white as thistle-down,
Tiny cheeses made with cream
From the Galaxy’s mid-stream,
Blanched in light of honeymoons,—
Eleanor makes macaroons!

Now for sugar,—nay, our plan
Tolerates no work of man.
Hurry, then, ye golden bees;
Fetch your clearest honey, please,
Garnered on a Yorkshire moor,
While the last larks sing and soar,
From the heather-blossoms sweet
Where sea-breeze and sunshine meet,
And the Augusts mask as Junes,—
Eleanor makes macaroons!

Next the pestle and mortar find,
Pure rock-crystal,—these to grind
Into paste more smooth than silk,
Whiter than the milkweed’s milk:
Spread it on a rose-leaf, thus,
Cate to please Theocritus;
Then the fire with spices swell,
While, for her completer spell,
Mystic canticles she croons,—
Eleanor makes macaroons!

Perfect! and all this to waste
On a graybeard’s palsied taste!
Poets so their verses write,
Heap them full of life and light,
And then fling them to the rude
Mumbling of the multitude.
Not so dire her fate as theirs,
Since her friend this gift declares
Choicest of his birthday boons,—
Eleanor’s dear macaroons!

(February 22, 1884)

~ from Heartsease and Rue (Houghton Mifflin, 1888)

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