Poetry Challenge #119-Iridescence of Lights
“Tis the hap-happiest season of all,” the song goes.
converge, we are smack dab in the midst of the festivities. One way these holidays are celebrated is with lights! Lights! Lights! Lights!
Poetry Challenge #119
Iridescence of Lights
In celebration of the holidays, write an acrostic poem about your holiday traditions. An acrostic poem uses the letter of a topic word or words to create a poem.
1. Write the word “Light” (or another holiday-related word) vertically down the length of a page.
2. For each letter, write a related word or idea beginning with that letter extending out horizontally.
3. Take a few moments to refine your poem. Try adding or changing some words to add interest, rhythm or rhyme to your poem.
4. Select your favorite word or image to be the title of your poem.
Below is my effort entitled (predictably) LIGHTS!
“LIGHTS!
Luminous
Iridescent rainbow
Glimmering strands of
Holiday magic
Twinkling
Stars show the way home”
Set your timer for 7 minutes
Don’t think about it too much; just do it!
Start writing!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge over 1300 days ago. We now take turns creating our own prompts to share with you. (This one is Cindy’s.) If you join us in the 7-Minute Poetry Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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One Candle, My Ferris Wheel, a Potato
Marvelous the way memory works. I think of mine like a Ferris Wheel*. When the music starts, the squeaky wheel spins for a while, slows to a stop, the door on the little cage closest to the ground swings open to let someone--or some memory--out, the door closes, the wheel starts spinning, that cage swings up out of reach, another cage swings to a stop.
I know what's in the cages on either side. I can almost reach them . . . almost.
As for those cages way up at the top? If I squint hard, I can see them. But danged if I know what's in them . . .
A book review of Eve Bunting's One Candle, on Lori Norman's writer blog: StoryQuill conjured a cage that must have been so far up on my Ferris Wheel it was lost in the clouds. It's out of season. Random, totally. But, that's how my wheel rolls:
The door swung open to a long ago Christmas Eve when in a panic, I pulled off the highway to call Ronnie because I'd forgotten the menorah.
I'd called from a gas station pay phone because we didn't' have cell phone back then. Rosie (as we called Lexi back then) and Max (ever Max) were especially excited because that year Hanukkah and Christmas Eve were on the same day, so we NEEDED a menorah!
With the last name of Goldman, everyone but the few acquainted with the prominent "Catholic Goldmans" of Tulsa, assumed we were Jewish, and I, a non-practicing anything, with two half-Jewish as possible--considering the Jewish half was not their mother's half--children was committed to upholding all traditions. Fortunately, my dear friend and writing partner, Ronnie, a full-blood Jewess and, as it happens the first women in Oklahoma to have a Bat Mitzvah.
In addition to baking & decorating the best Hanukkah sugar cookies, was educated enough for both of us.
"You can use a potato!" Ronnie told me. She went on to explain how during the Holocaust, because Jews were not allowed to keep traditions, were, in truth, imprisoned or killed if any religious accouterments were discovered in their possession, they improvised: thus the Dreidel game, a secret way to study the Torah; the common potato, a secret menorah.
We stopped at a grocery story before we stopped for the night. And that night and for the following seven nights, light our potato menorah, said prayers, and opened gifts.
This photo is not mine, but this is including the birthday candles--sans the gold paint--what our menorah looked like.
In One Candle, Eve Bunting shares another grandmother's potato menorah story. Hers wasn't a Piggly-Wiggly supermarket russet, hers was stolen from a Buchenwald prison kitchen. Here's a snippet of the review:
“With a little stolen butter and a thread from Rose’s skirt placed in a hollow she’d carved out of the potato, and with a stolen match, they made a candle in their barracks on the first night of Hanukkah. ‘It lifted us to the stars,’Grandma says. ”
Up up up to the stars . . . And on the way, nudged my Ferris Wheel. The power of words: it takes so few to coax down a distant cage.
*Wait! Before the music plays and the wheel spins again: Be sure to check out Dani Sneed's book, THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE FERRIS WHEEL. about George Ferris and his World's Fair Wonder! You and every kid you know will be glad you did.
Thanks for reading!
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