GottaBook

30 Poets/One Day

2020-05-01T20:29:00.001-07:00

April was a great poetry month here at Gottabook (I say with bias but also factually). How great? Here's what showed up during 30 Poets/30 Days:

Douglas Florian - Bigfoot
April Halprin Wayland - Tender
Charles Waters - Watery Blue Ceiling
Carmen T. Bernier-Grand - La Alancia
David L. Harrison - Toothy Grin (Kit Fox)
Adam Rex - 47
Jane Yolen - Escaping Bonn
Charles Ghigna - Be Still
Kenn Nesbitt - Dizzy Dottie's Dog Salon
Liz Garton Scanlon - Look Around
Bob Raczka - Squirrel
Ellen Hopkins - Country Kids Exist on Their Own Planet
Lee Bennett Hopkins - Spring
Rebecca Kai Dotlich - Missing
Linda Sue Park - School Days: Spring 2020
Calef Brown - Dream
Marilyn Singer - Natural Disasters
Ann Whitford Paul - Too Big For Bear
Janet Wong - Look for Birds
Julie Larios - What Did I See?
Brod Bagert - When I'm Old & Gray
Kristine O'Connell George - Seagull Comments
Kathi Appelt - Quarantine
Nancy Bo Flood - Go Fish
Darren Sardelli - Our Teacher Was the Greatest
Georgia Heard - A Quivering of Wings
Ed DeCaria - Another school dream (this time with a spider)
Bruce Balan - The Poem I Would Write
Nikki Grimes - Unvarnished Healing
Greg Pincus - Still

Yup. A great month. Again, I thank all the poets, Bonnie Adamson for the logos, and all of you for reading along (and for comments, emails, and tweets too!). This was the sixth edition of 30 Poets/30 Days, with a multi-year gap between the fifth and this one. Will there be a seventh? It's too early to say... but I do know we always need poetry wherever we can find it.

(Speaking of which... it's Poetry Friday once again, and you can find the roundup of all participating bloggers over at Elizabeth Steinglass's Poetry for Children and Their Grownups. There's a new roundup weekly, so you can find poetry when you need it.)

I have no idea what blogging will happen here moving forward, but it was fun to dust this place off. Until the next time... onward!

Greg Pincus - Still

2020-04-30T23:37:00.001-07:00

STILL

by Greg Pincus

We still our cities, still our schools.

We still and watch with shock.

We still our bodies, still our minds.

We still… and we take stock.

We still have earth beneath our feet.

We still have sky above.

We still have art and friends and joy.

We still have hope and love.

We feel the world still spinning round -

Each night still yields to day.

We still don’t know the path ahead….

Still - we’ll find our way.

Today's poem wraps up this year's edition of 30 Poets/30 Days. I offer up another big thank you to Bonnie Adamson for making me two logos when I plaintively asked for help. And of course, I give a huge thank you to the poets who joined in this year on the spur of the moment.

Finally, I thank all y'all who've read along and shared the poetry with others. This definitely seemed to me like a year for poetry, and I'm glad to know that others felt so, too. Poetry is a good thing. We need good things now... and always.

Onward!

Nikki Grimes - Unvarnished Healing

2020-04-29T23:39:00.000-07:00

Unvarnished Healing

John 9:1-41

by Nikki Grimes

There are those who insist

gifts of speaking in tongues

and heavenly healing

belong to yesteryear,

when Holy Spirit movement stories

flowed from that old time religion.

But were those mighty works of God

merely once-upon-a-time?

According to John, Jesus spoke of

the "we" of this work,

a ministry calling

with no timelines, deadlines,

or time limits implied.

I heal, you heal, he/she/we heal

whenever God moves through

prayer and the laying on of hands,

this work perfectly modeled

by the Perfect One, himself

on a particular Sabbath, when his mercy

settled on a man sightless from birth.

Curious, how the disciples'

very first thoughts turned to

whose sin was to blame for this blindness,

while some Pharisees rebuked this rule-breaker rabbi

for daring to work on the Sabbath.

Which are we?

Disciples or Pharisees?

Will judgment cause us

to miss the miracle?

We are called to enter into

all of God's good work,

and to worship him with praise

for his unvarnished healing.

I don't know that there's anyone who smiths words the way Nikki Grimes does. She will knock your socks off, no matter what she writes. Like the above poem or One Last Word, her book which uses the Golden Shovel form (and if you wanna know more about that form/write one yourself, here's the poet herself to tell you all about it).

Or beyond that, I predict you'll be dazzled if you read any of her broad range of books... like her award winning memoir, Ordinary Hazards (which got both a Printz and a Siebert Honor nod from the ALA).

And if her current lineup of books isn't enough... look at what she's got coming down the pike this year alone - Southwest Sunrise in May and Kamala Harris: Rooted in Justice coming out in August. I mean, come on now. She will knock your socks off in so many ways that you'll be sockless all year... and you'll be glad of it, I say.