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#SOL16. No.28.

Melted snowflakes
Maple-wood smoke
Hints of cinnamon, cardamon, cumin
In the mysterious Old Country
That no one knows anymore

Every winter a hundred years long
Every spring a miracle
Water like music, music like water
In the Old Country
Whose name and borders have changed

There was magic
There was war
A little girl, and a fox with a tail
Long, long ago
In the Old Country


Writing about my writing

old-country

One of my favorites is Mordecai Gerstein’s The Old Country. Beautifully written, a story within a story. It captures you, like the best of fairy tales or folk tales, an allegory of war, of a holocaust.

In it, I’ve found marvelous descriptive passages to use as mentor texts. The book opens with a Prelude that sets the story. If you don’t read it, you will miss much.

From the pages of the Prelude, I wrote this found poem.

Below is my first draft of the poem with a sketch in my journal. Today, I did a bit of revision–changed some line breaks, added a few words, and flipped the last two lines for effect, to end with the title.

old-country


Slice of Life
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and a great community of writers / educators
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A special thanks to StaceyTaraDanaBetsyAnnaBethKathleen, and Deb for a place at Two Writing Teachers where teachers and others can share their stories each Tuesday throughout the year and every day during the month of March.