New Poem

For a workshop and concert I did last week, I wrote a new poem. Here goes:

All the butterflies I see
Elude my net evasively
No matter where I try to be
They zig and zag away from me.

I swing and fling – a wide wind blow –
Then fancy flutter-colors go.
To pause a pair of purple wings!
To cage some multi-colored things!

Those butterflies! Away they get
Despite the clever traps I set.
All the butterflies I see
Apparently
They need to be
Alive and free.
Too bad for me.

© 2007 Elizabeth Bushey

:: :: :: ^ ^ :: :: ::

What tremendous fun I had at Chorley Elementary School in Middletown, N.Y. last week.

What I love best is the way we start: I have a felt board with a large tic-tac-toe board. I seek a few volunteers to play with me, since even five-year-olds know the game. We begin: they're handed their choice of felt Xs or Os (a surprising number of them choose the bright green Os) and they go first, placing their marker industriously, obediently where it goes.

I place mine somewhere completely wrong. On the line, on top of their X, draped on the side of the board -- somewhere shockingly, totally wrong.

Universally, since I am the grownup, and not least of all, the new grownup there presumably to teach them something, the volunteer continues without questioning me, although the crowd typically murmurs.

Again, I screw it up. There is laughter as we continue, and I progress with more and more blatantly wrong moves, often, if the volunteer seems open enough to it, placing my O or X on their head.

I'll then turn to the crowd, quizzically: "What's the problem? Why CAN'T I play this way? But this is how I want to play. You mean there are RULES?"

Children, of COURSE, delight in explaining the rules to me, a grownup -- who mysteriously has somehow made it to adulthood without picking up this game along the way.

Eventually leading them to discover for themselves that even a game as simple and straightforward as tic-tac-toe is really no fun without playing by the rules. Funny to watch them getting broken, for sure -- but not really fun to play.

So too, I show them, poetry has "rules" -- called, instead, "poetic techniques" -- that make it fun to write. No rules, really, for what you write about: you can talk about anything from your shoes to your nose, to the firefly that glows -- even boogers could be a poem, if you're clever or funny -- but rhyme, meter, alliteration -- all of these are tools to use, like a carpenter and a hammer.

I even have a poem called Tic-Tac-Toe:

Tic Tac Toe
A game we know
At least, a game
We think we know.
Familiar with
The lines we make,
The X, the O,
The give and take –
In fact, we know it
Out and in –
So why is it
We never win?
Why is it so
On every try
No matter what
We always tie?

© 2005 Elizabeth Bushey