Daily Poem July 8 2009

I'll be running a poetry hour for 2nd and 3rd graders tomorrow. So I'm trying out the exercise they'll do. It's a slight modification of an exercise created by Cora Vail Brooks in her book of writing exercises, The Sky Blew Blue.

Write your name on a paper bag. Think of something you would NEVER want to be or do. Write a poem about a person with your name who actually does the thing you would never do. Begin the poem by writing 'In this bag is a girl(boy) named ....'

The rhythm is established for the child by the first line, which includes the name.
I tried to anticipate one of the names I've run into recently for this age group.

When they are done with the poem, the poets get to decorate the bag to illustrate what the person inside does.

Haley The Herpetologist

In this bag is a girl named Haley,
who catches snakes almost daily.
She puts them in a long glass box
with sticks and leaves and fuzzy moss.
She also locks a screen on top
so the snakes don’t crawl in her mother’s mop
or down the legs of her kitchen chairs
to meet the orange cat down there.
She likes to count the green snakes’ freckles.
She likes to watch their toothy grins,
their slithering slides between the sticks,
the way they lick their skinny lips
with tongues that look like licorice whips.
And when the sun is turning red,
she takes the snake box to the woods
and lets her catch of snakes go free,
because tomorrow, Haley knows,
where some other snakes will be.