Summer Is

 

Anaphora

 

Momentum

photo via Unsplash

Momentum

When you take your foot off the gas pedal

and roll to a stop in front of your house.

When you stop pumping your legs on the swing

and enjoy the ever-shortening trips back and forth.

When you stand still on your skates and just roll

feeling every pebble and sidewalk crack under your wheels.

When you sit at your desk and stare at the ceiling

and let go of the task at hand.

When you know there is a mountain of work to be done

and you deliberately choose not to do it.

Since when did loss of momentum

become equated with some kind of failure?

Today I will reclaim loss of momentum

as a form of pleasure.

I will savor the slow down and the pull back

the drifting and the regathering of strength so I can begin again

later.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2021 (draft)

Indoor Recess

Indoor Recess

Too cold again.
Too snowy for outdoor recess.
Too many days spent with the same twenty classmates.
Too limited without electronics.

We already built with blocks.
We already played board games.
We already made up a storytelling game.
We already finished four jigsaw puzzles.

Let's play all together!
Let's play a whole class game!
Let's play Heads Up Seven Up!
Let's play!

***

It's amazing to see them ALL play together.
It's amazing -- first time in my career it's happened.
It's amazing to know that collaboration can emerge so naturally.
It's amazing to have faith and hope reaffirmed during indoor recess.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2014

The Poetry Stretch at Tricia's blog was a new form to me -- anaphora, "the repetition of the same word or phrase in several successive clauses." There are some spectacular examples in the comments. Mine describes what happened at recess this week.