Our Wonderful World: The Golden Gate Bridge

Details of my Poetry Month Project can be found here.

Wikipedia

13. Golden Gate Bridge

I'm photogenic

posing with waves, fog, sunsets

expensive "steel harp"

©Mary Lee Hahn

Carol has a pair of poems for the Empire State Building at Carol's Corner.

Kevin also has a haiku today for the GGB.

I wanted to write short today so I would have time to share some of my students' writing.

For our Poetry Friday lesson, I shared my poems for the week with my students. (They didn't write with me this week. They were doing micro-research cause/effect paragraphs on slow and fast processes that change the earth.) I announced the theme of "Places" for their Poetry Friday reading or writing of poetry and sent them off to work. As always, they blew me away when we got back to share.

We heard poems from a wide range of poetry books:

Dinothesaurus: Prehistoric Poems and Paintings by Douglas Florian (the one about the T-Rex, perhaps at a museum or on site at a dig)

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry: 200 Poems with Photographs That Squeak, Soar, and Roar! collected by J. Patrick Lewis ("City Mouse/Country Mouse")

Stampede!: Poems to Celebrate the Wild Side of School by Laura Purdee Salas (the one about getting lost in a new school -- very appropriate since they visited their middle schools this week and are a delicious mixture of excitement and dread)

A Strange Place to Call Home: The World's Most Dangerous Habitats & the Animals That Call Them Home by Marilyn Singer (the one about the mountain goats)

Out of This World: Poems and Facts about Space by Amy Sklansky (the one about blasting off -- our space expert has read a poem from this book just about EVERY Poetry Friday all year long!)

A World of Wonders: Geographic Travels in Verse and Rhyme by J. Patrick Lewis (I don't remember which poem, but perfect choice of books, eh?)

And we heard these originals (among others a bit too rough for publication just yet):


Catacombs

Here I go
off by myself
just a donkey
without a doubt.
Then I tripped
into a place.
It felt as if
I went 100 feet deep.
Then I realized
it was a tomb.
Three cheers for the donkey!
They thought I didn't have a clue.

by HF


Riddle

I am at a place where you can get whatever you desire.
You can have something as cool as the wind, or as spicy as fire.
I bet you will admire
the ones we have hired.
So can you guess where I am?

(Subway..."eat fresh")

by CS


If You Use Your Mind

China holds a conga line,
Egypt makes chocolate kisses,
Home is what's yours and mine,
America has famous Miss-es.

Earth holds land, sea, and sky,
but it would be nothing without creation.
Earth holds those who walk, swim and fly,
creatures of all ages.

Jungles are a line of I's,
pines are cones of ice cream,
snow makes lands of sparkly white,
ice cream that stands on tall mountains.

Liberty is a welcomer of copper green,
the sea is a place you long to see.
Palms hold food and water, too,
all these things are on earth for you.

by MC


Here's another MC wrote, inspired by Stonehenge:


Rain was falling on me,
only one place left to go.
Stone.

I sat against the smooth stone,
shaded slightly from the rain.
Alone.

The place seemed erie,
I wondered if anyone was there.
One.

I thought I could hear whispers,
but
it's just my imagination.

I thought I could see figures.
I thought I could feel hands.
I thought I could hear voices.

I thought.
I knew.

I knew there was someone --
no,
it's not my imagination.

I knew I could see figures.
I knew I could feel hands.
I knew I could hear voices.

I knew.
I wondered.

I wondered if it was my imagination --
maybe,
maybe not.

I wondered who the figures were.
I wondered if they were like me.
I wondered what they were trying to say.

I wondered.
I thought.

by MC