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Back-to-School Haiku

summer sun
creeps across the floor
five days more

in the trees
cicadas whisper–
the grind of the bus

back to school:
familiar hallways
unfamiliar

assigned seats–
pointy crayons
in neat rows

history–
someone else’s name
in my book

cafeteria–
stepping out
on the ice

(c) 2012 Elizabeth Ehrenfest Steinglass, all rights reserved

For more Poetry Friday go to Sylvia Vardell’s Poetry for Children.

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Three Cinquains

photo Sylvia Duckworth

Spiders
Work in the night
Wrapping the garden in
Silk ribbons, turning peas into
Presents.

 

The girls
Unearth the beets.
They pull their hair and scrub
Their cheeks and fill the sink with hands
Dyed pink.

 

Cinquains
Grow slowly, each
Line slightly longer than
The one before, building up to
The end.

 

I was reminded of the cinquain by a fellow poet this week, so I went back and read again about Adelaide Crapsey and the form she invented. Crapsey appreciated haiku and invented her own, similar form, the cinquain, which has five lines of two, four, six, eight, then two syllables. After writing many haiku over the summer, I was curious to revisit the cinquain to see how it might feel different to write in a form that was intended for English. I even took one of my haiku from last week and rewrote it as a cinquain. For me the haiku feels like two photographs brushing against one another as they fall, while the cinquain feels like climbing a little hill before jumping off the other side.
For more Poetry Friday go to A Year of Reading

(c) 2012 Elizabeth Ehrenfest Steinglass, all rights reserved

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August Haiku

tomatoes
tug the vine
waiting

a summer sunshower
harvesting rainbow chard

scrubbed beets
a sink full
of pink hands

a dog
     a splash
          swaying cattails

one more carrot
yanked from the garden
a car starting

August leaves
sag in the afternoon
I count days

(c) 2012 Elizabeth Ehrenfest Steinglass, all rights reserved

We were lucky enough to spend a few days in Vermont with dear friends. The highlight of our trip was harvesting vegetables from the garden–tomatoes, carrots, beets, broccoli, and rainbow chard. The kids especially loved pulling the carrots and beets from the dirt and scrubbing them in the sink. I wrote these haiku when we got home, savoring my memories of those days far from the city. They make quite a contrast to the haiku from June. The end of the summer is in the air. For more Poetry Friday go to Violet Nesdoly/poems.

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