Toucan Talk: An Original Mask Poem

Tricia is back with another poetry challenge for us this week at The Miss Rumphius Effect: Monday Poetry Stretch - Animal Poems.

For Tricia’s Poetry Stretch, I decided to revisit an animal mask poem about a toucan that I had written many years ago. I wasn’t happy with the poem’s ending. I had changed it a number of times. I decided to do a bit more research on the toucan—of which there are different types—in hopes of getting some fresh ideas for the poem…and maybe writing a better ending.


Here’s the toucan poem as it stands at the moment:


TOUCAN TALK
by Elaine Magliaro

I’m Toucan. I’m more beak than bird.
In profile I may look absurd.
I sport a bill that’s giant-size.
It’s true. I don’t hyperbolize.
It’s strong and filled with rigid foam.
It’s like an airy honeycomb.
It doesn’t weigh me down. It’s light!
It’s sharp.
It’s colorful
And bright.
It helps me to attract a mate.
It’s perfect female birdie bait!
It’s really great for plucking fruit
From trees—and self defense, to boot.
A useful tool, it’s versatile—
A beak that truly fits the bill!

Poems for Poetry in a Suitcase

Janet Wong sent me a link to the following post at the Mama Without Borders blog: Packing our “poetry in a suitcase.” I think you'll find this post about an inventive method for getting children excited about poetry--a method suggested by Janet--quite interesting. Minerva Canto, the author of Mama Without Borders, wrote about how effective using a “poetry suitcase” she had decorated and filled with poems and objects was in helping to get her son and daughter interested in listening to and talking about poems.

I feel strongly that poetry should be an integral part of children’s literary lives. I also feel that it’s of great import to introduce children to this genre when they’re very young—at a time in their lives when they are most receptive to it...at a time when they take great pleasure in hearing poems and stories with rhythm and rhyme…at a time when they’re like little sponges absorbing and then repeating everything they hear. Getting children interested in poetry when they’re wee toddlers may be the best method to foster an appreciation for it that could last throughout their lives.

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Edited to Add

Janet Wong left the following advice in the comments:

A simple way for teachers to create a Poetry Suitcase is to make it a homework assignment. Hand out large index cards and tell the children that they have one week to find a poem. It could be a short poem, long poem, poem they love, poem they hate...whatever: they just need to write it down on the index card.

Next they need to find some prop to tie to the card. For instance, if the poem was about trees, they could tie it to a branch. One week after giving the homework assignment, a teacher will have a Poetry Suitcase full of dozens of poems and props that could be very fun to share, perhaps during the last 5 minutes of the day, when kids are especially wiggly...

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For Poetry Friday this week, I thought I’d recommend some poetry collections and anthologies that are excellent for sharing with young children— preschoolers, kindergartners, and kids in the early elementary grades. The books include poems that would be great to pack up in your own "poetry suitcase."

On the Farm
Written by David Elliott
Illustrated by Holly Meade
Candlewick Press, 2008

Click here to read my review of On the Farm.

Busy in the Garden
Written by George Shannon
Illustrated by Sam Williams
Greenwillow, 2006

Click here to read my review of Busy in the Garden.

Nibble Nibble
Written by Margaret Wise Brown
Illustrated by Wendell Minor
HarperCollins, 2007

Click here to read my review of Nibble Nibble.

The Llama Who Had No Pajama: 100 Favorite Poems
Written by Mary Ann Hoberman
Illustrated by Betty Fraser
Browndeer Press/Harcourt Brace, 1998

Click here to read a brief review of the book and some of the poems included in this outstanding collection of poems by our new Children’s Poet Laureate.

Here’s a Little Poem: A Very First Book of Poetry
Collected by Jane Yolen & Andrew Fusek Peters
Illustrated by Polly Dunbar
Candlewick Press, 2007

Click here to read my review of Here’s a Little Poem.

Go! Poetry in Motion
Written by Dee Lillegard
Illustrated by Valeri Gorbachev
Knopf, 2006

This is a fun little book of poems about all kinds of things that can be put into motion: a scooter, roller skates, hot air balloon, wheelbarrow, roller coaster, ice skates, freight train, helicopter, etc. The rhyming poems are short—most of them have no more than four lines. These are poems that young children could quickly learn to memorize and recite. Here are two poems from the book:

Lawn Mower

Chewing grass
is all she knows.
She never moos,
just mows and mows.


Sailboat

Wind-catcher,
water-skipper,
white-sailed
wave-dipper.

Roar and More
Written and illustrated by Karla Kuskin
Harper & Row, 1956, 1990

This is Karla Kuskin’s first published book of poems. It began as a project for a class she was taking while a student at the Yale School of Design in the 1950s. Originally published in just two colors—black and yellow—the book was reissued in 1990 in full color.

This is a delightful book of short rhythmic, rhyming poems about different animals (elephant, tiger, fish, snake, kangaroo, cat, dogs, mouse, etc.) and the sounds they make. Each animal gets four pages—or two two-page spreads. There is an illustration of and a poem about the animal on the first two pages and the sound that the animal makes on the second two pages.

First two-page spread about the elephant:

The elephant’s nose makes a very good hose
Or maybe a holders for flowers.
It can snore, it can croon
Or trumpet a tune.
It has most remarkable powers.

Second two-page spread:
HOOOOOOOOOOONK


Click here to read some of the poems and view illustrations included in Roar and More.

Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young
Selected by Jack Prelutsky
Illustrated by Marc Brown
Alfred A. Knopf, 1986

Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young is a wonderful general anthology of poems about many different subjects: animals, weather, seasons, picnics, feelings, and childhood activities. It includes poems by Dorothy Aldis, John Ciardi, Eleanor Farjeon, Aileen Fisher, Mary Ann Hoberman, Karla Kuskin, Myra Cohn Livingston, David McCord, Eve Merriam, Lilian Moore, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others. Marc Brown’s cartoonlike illustrations add to the humor and childlike wonder expressed in many of the selections. This is a “must have” anthology for parents and teachers of young children.

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At Blue Rose Girls I have a special Favorite Poem Project video of Stephen Conteaguero talking about his life and reciting the poem Politics by William Butler Yates in honor of Memorial Day.

Susan Taylor Brown has the Poetry Friday Roundup today.

DAYBREAK: An Original Acrostic

I’ve been a bit “under the weather” for about a month—and therefore not posting as often here of late or at Political Verses. I just started having acupuncture treatments this week—and they seem to be helping with my problem.

Here’s one of my acrostics for Poetry Friday. Unfortunately, dawn arrived without a bright sunshiny face where I live this morning.

Dawn, dressed in a bright blue robe

And golden slippers,

Yawns awake. Stars scurry away.

Breaking into song, birds

Rouse the sun,

Eager to start

A new day. Morning bounds out of bed with delight,

Kicking off the dark cover of night.

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At Blue Rose Girls, I have three poems for my daughter Sara. The poems were written by Naomi Shihab Nye, James Lenfestey, and Margaret Atwood.

Kelly Polark has the Poetry Friday Roundup today.

Happy Mother's Day!!!

It’s Mother’s Day. It’s sunny and warm and breezy here. I’m going out to dinner at my favorite restaurant with my husband and my mother and my beautiful daughter. Things don’t get much better than this. I have good reason to celebrate this special day!

My Daughter Sara & Me

My Mother & One of Her Great Grandsons

Some Mother’s Day Poems for You
Two Poems for Mother's Day (Wild Rose Reader, May 2008)
Poems for Mother's Day (Blue Rose Girls, May 2008)

More Color Poems

PART I

In an earlier Wild Rose Reader post in which I wrote a review of Joyce Sidman’s wonderful new collection of poems about color titled Red Sings from Treetops, Joyce and I invited my blog readers to write and share their own color poems with us. Rebecca took up the poetry challenge. Here is her poem about PINK:

Pink is the color of a warm embrace,

a kiss from Grandma,

a baby’s face.

A wash of color on a sunset sky,

a flush of fever,

a happy sigh.

A cozy cuddle on a cool afternoon,

fragrant blossoms,

a song-bird’s tune.

Pink is all puffy and happy and proud,

bright as the sun,

soft as a cloud.

Jone’s students also wrote some color poems. Jone shared the poems at her blog Check It Out in the following post—Poetry Friday: Color Poems.

I also wrote and posted four original Color Poems.

PART II: Some More Color Poems for You

From Color
by Christina Rossetti

What is pink? a rose is pink
By a fountain's brink.
What is red? a poppy's red
In its barley bed.
What is blue? the sky is blue
Where the clouds float thro'.
What is white? a swan is white
Sailing in the light.

You can read the rest of the poem here.

From Yellow Sonnet

by Paul Zimmer

Zimmer no longer wishes to write

About the dimming of his lights,

Recounting all his small terrors.

Instead he tells of brilliance,

Walking home from first grade

In springtime, light descending

To hold itself and dazzle him

In an outburst of dandelions.

You can read the rest of the poem here.

From Colors Passing through Us
by Marge Piercy

Purple as tulips in May, mauve
into lush velvet, purple
as the stain blackberries leave
on the lips, on the hands,
the purple of ripe grapes
sunlit and warm as flesh.

Every day I will give you a color,
like a new flower in a bud vase
on your desk. Every day
I will paint you, as women
color each other with henna
on hands and on feet.

Red as henna, as cinnamon,
as coals after the fire is banked,
the cardinal in the feeder,
the roses tumbling on the arbor
their weight bending the wood
the red of the syrup I make from petals.

You can read the rest of the poem here.

You can find the children’s poem Taste of Purple by Leland B. Jacobs here.

Part III: Books with Color Poems

Red Sings from Treetops: A Year in Colors
Written by Joyce Sidman
Illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski
Houghton Mifflin, 2009

Read my review of Sidman’s book here.

Color Me a Rhyme: Nature Poems for Young People
Written by Jane Yolen
Photographs by Jason Stemple
Wordsong/Boyds Mills Press, 2000

The poems in this collection focus on the colors one sees in nature: the greens of ferns and trees and grass and leaves; the orange of a sunset sky and lichens growing on rocks; the pink of a thistle flower; the yellow of an autumn leaf; the reds of berries and butterfly wings. In her Note from the Author, Jane Yolen explains how she had asked her photographer son Jason Stemple to find her colors in nature when they discussed collaborating on this book. Stemple shot pictures in the hills of Massachusetts, the mountains of Colorado, and the desert of the Southwest—for two years. Jane then selected the photographs she liked the best to serve as inspiration for the thirteen poems included in this collection.
The pairing of Yolen’s poems with Stemple’s pictures create unified expressions of the different colors written about in the text. In addition to the poems and photographs, words that name the variety of hues in which a color may be found in nature are printed horizontally and vertically in large letters on the pages. For example, on the two-page spread with the poem about purple, readers will find the color words amethyst, orchid, lavender, plum, violet, and wine. Yolen suggests readers write poems from her son’s photos in the book. She says that she included the “extra” color words as an added “incentive.”

The book’s first poem, GREEN, begins…

Whichever angel had the task
of naming greens, squatting
on the hard new ground,
robe guttering at his perfect feet,
did not do his work well.
He gave us chartreuse, olive, leek,
emerald, ivy, beryl.
But they are not nearly enough
when the world is so much green.
Ferns, trees, grass, stems,
petals, limbs, leaves…

How great it would be to share this poem with students and then have them search for different shades of green on the playground at recess, in their own yards, on a walk through a meadow or the woods in the springtime. It would be a fine way to help children learn to become more careful observers of the world around them.

Color Me a Rhyme includes rhymed and unrhymed poems—including four haiku. Pink: A Haiku provides an excellent example of how a poet can perceive an object in nature in a truly imaginative way. Yolen “sees” a thistle flower as a punk hairstyle.

PINK : A HAIKU

A surge of sunlight
Shocks through stem and thistle hairs.
A punk pink hairdo.

The collection closes with Crayons: A Rainbow Poem in which Yolen speaks about a crayon box containing “the wash of blue sky/spikes of green spring/a circle of yellow sun.” the box also holds human diversity: my pink/and your chocolate/and her burnt sienna/and his ivory skin/In it are all the colors of the world.” That’s a fitting way to conclude this fine book of color poems.

Classroom Connection
Color Me a Rhyme would be an excellent springboard for a cross curricular writing/science/photography activity. Students could be asked to look for/point out certain colors in nature while on a walking field trip—or even after school. The children/the teacher/the children's parents could take photographs of leaves, tree bark, soil, flowers, insects, spider webs, etc. Once the photographs were developed or printed out on a computer, children could use them as inspiration for writing their own color poems. Then the teacher could help the children compile their own photographs and poems in a class Color Me A Poem anthology.

Hailstones and Halibut Bones
Written by Mary O’Neill
Illustrated by John Wallner

Hailstones and Halibut Bones was first published way back in 1961. In 1989, it was republished with lovely new illustrations done by John Wallner. This is a book of rhyming list poems about twelve colors—including black, white and gray. In the poems, O’Neill talks about the sights, sounds, smells, and feelings that she associates with particular colors:

Time is purple
Just before night…


Gold is the sunshine
Light and thin
Warm as a muffin
On your skin.


Brown is the color of work
And the sound of a river…

You can hear blue
In wind over water…


Pussywillows are gray
In a velvety way.


Red is a hotness
You get inside
When you’re embarrassed
And want to hide…
And when you’re angry
Red runs through your head.

Green is the coolness
You get in the shade
Of the tall old woods
Where the moss is made.

Think of what starlight
And lamplight would lack
Diamonds and fireflies
If they couldn’t lean against
Black….

Sharing poems from Hailstones and Halibut Bones with children could serve as a good way to get them to talk about/discuss the different things that come to mind when they think about certain colors.

Click here to see a double-page spread from Hailstones and Halibut Bones.

Hailstones and Halibut Bones Lesson Plan (Scholastic)

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Anastasia Suen has the Poetry Friday Roundup at Picture Book of the Day.