Three Poems

Three Poems
Svitak, Adora

Sharpshooter's spectacles
Proud brass buttons
Shortages and heavy-caliber rifles.

Gray, gray linen shirt
And a Springfield Rifle tall;
Decorative buck tails are trifles.

Light cavalry saber that glints in the sun.
Who knows what it could have done.

It's funny but kids like the big guns best.
They play on the wood axle shields
And turn the iron-banded whells.

Pow! Pow! go the guns
And the ironclads last;
A voltigeur's fight, and the Civil War's past.

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I believe that that poem needs some explanation. If you're wondering about all the weird Civil War specific weaponry I included in it, it was because the class activity was to use specific language from reference books to write a poem. My book was about the Civil War.

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In the depths of Rajasthan
In the shadows of Ranthambore
On the turf of the Gobblededook,
A raven croaked and sped off to the shore.

My mother told me to stay away
From the Gobblededook and his ire
But that had always been my dream--
And such dreams never tire.

At the door of the Gobblededook
A door an evil black like coal,
I trembled and I knocked and then--
The Gobblededook ate me whole!

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If you're wondering about the "Rathambore" and "Rajasthan", Rajasthan is a state of India and Rathambore is a tiger preserve in Rajasthan that I read about in Time magazine. We were supposed to choose words that we liked from an article that we liked and use them in a poem.

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To be eleven, oh so grand,
And high-and-mighty, vorpal;
To lord it over wee bugflies
And have no lack of torpor;

Stare at grass and daffodils
And bees that rumble-bumble;
The snakes that crawl, and stove the kettle
For squat birches that do sing

Shall welcome thou, and didst
Eleven is too, certainly
of certainty,
Peas Porridge Hot will solve it all,
Now listen to your mother's call.

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This was actually the first poem that I wrote of these three. In this class activity, we listened to the poem "Jabberwocky" and came up with words that we liked the sound of. Some of my words, as you may have guessed, were "Peas Porridge Hot", bugflies, and kettle. (Bugflies, by the way, is not a real word).

Katie's writing inspired by a picture

Bauml, Katie

Writing inspired by a picture

It was a warm, sunny evening in Okinawa, Japan. The sun was high in the sky. In the nice reddish glow you could make out a tall red and pink temple. Inside the temple you could hear many people talking and eating cucumber sushi and Ori. Lower to the ground was a white house with red trim and a purple roof. It was a bath house, an addition to the temple. All around the temple were short, round Japanese maples. During the day time they would have been the color of blood but at this time of the evening some were light pink with a trim of blinding white and others were deep purple with a light pink trim. Behind the bath house you could see a mountain which looked like a very obese purple pencil with white lead. The sky was a multi-color rainbow. At the horizon it was yellow, almost white, but only a few feet higher the sky turned into a light pink which looked like the leaves on cherry trees in spring. Then farther up the sky was a sea of bright red which looked as though time had stopped and if time had not been stopped the sky would have engulfed the sun. The red blended with the pink, so some was pink, some was red, and in between there was a fuchsia color.

9 Alternate Hooks to Start Snow White

1. Blood bloomed in the snow.
2. Snow white was as pretty and empty as the glass box that would one day be her home.
3. Where does beauty end and ugliness begin?
4. Who was the fairest of them all? You and I know the answer, but hind site is 20/20. In the queen's day, when Snowwhite was just a child, the question was the beginning of a favorite debate.
5. Arbarizan was the kind of land where time seemed to move slowly or not at all.
6. The crack of icy branches made Snowwhite's heart leap. Her sweat smelled like fear as she stood frozen in the winter woods.
7. Sallow, morose, and astonishingly bitter, Snowwhite was an unattractive child.
8. Shakespeare said that all the world's a stage. The stepmother agreed.
9. Snowwhite could not distinguish between her footsteps on the frozen ground and the beating of her own heart.