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Sally Murphy, Australian author

Poetry Friday: Winter is STILL Here

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It’s been over a month since my last Poetry Friday offering and, in that post I was complaining about the cold, and looking for reasons to LIKE winter.

Fast forward to today, and its cold and wet and wintry – and, you guessed it, I am still struggling to find good things about winter.

But, I do have a pair of haiku that I wrote about being cold – and trying to flip between the downsides of being cold and the upsides. Here it is:

Cold

Caught in the rain

Burning of frostbitten toes

Blades of wintry wind

 

A plunge in cold pool

Bubbling fizzing lemonade

Shivering lemonade.

(Copyright Sally Murphy)

Not sure this really counts as flipping the bad to the good – because I seem to be arguing that being cold is winter in bad, but being cold in summer is good. Can you tell I’m a summer person?

But, because I’m a contrary kind of person, I also have a pair of haiku about the pros and cons of being hot.

Hot

Sweat-drenched smelly socks

Suffocating in-school days

Unrelenting sun

 

Thawing spring sunshine

Steam rising from chocolate drink

Toasty slipper toes.

(Copyright Sally Murphy)

 

And you can see that I found the good things about being hot right in the midst of winter.

 

Incidentally, these ‘opposite haikus’ (as I call them) appeared in my book for teachers last year, and were written quite some time before that. It was only when I typed them up for this blog post that I noticed something in the syllable counts. If I’m sticking to a 5/7/5 syllable count for each haiku (and yes, I do know that true haiku do not have to adhere strictly to this count) – then  the line about the chocolate drink is questionable. It depends on pronunciation – the dictionary tells me that it definitely has 3 syllables – choc-o-late – but I confess, when Is ay it it definitely comes out with only two – chock – let – which is how it is that I have never noticed this in my own poem before.

Does it matter? Probably not – although now that I’ve noticed it, it annoys me, because I’m a stickler for rules.

But being distracted by syllable counts has taken my mind of being cold. So that’s gotta be good thing, right?

I’m off to make a hot chocolate and browse the rest of the Poetry Friday posts. They always warm my heart. The Roundup is hosted by Elisabeth – you should check it out 🙂

Poetry Friday: Hot Concrete

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Happy hoppy Friday. Why hoppy? Because today I’m going to share a poem with a little hopping involved.  Spring has well and truly arrived in my part of the world and this means that, whenever I can get away with it, my shoes are well and truly off. But there are times when one wishes, very much, that the shoes were on – and that’s what my poem is about.

The Hot Concrete Rap

My shoes are there

But I am here

They are too far

They are not near

 

I need those shoes

I need them now

I must fetch them

The problem’s how

 

To get from here

To over there

To fetch those shoes

I need to wear

 

Without the concrete

Hurting me

The hot concrete

That I can see

 

The sun is hot

The ground is too

There’s only one thing

I can do

 

I must hop

From here to there

To get the shoes

I need to wear

 

I hop on left foot

Then on right

I hop hop hop

With all my might

 

My shoes are here

And I am too

And now each foot

Is in its shoe.

(Poem copyright Sally Murphy)

Now,  hop on over to the Poetry Friday Roundup where, coincidentally, Susan has posted a poem about a different kind of hopper.

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