I often write a poem in response to a prompt. Perhaps a friend has an anthology about bugs and needs a bug poem. Or a magazine wants a poem about a specific topic. Or I am writing a novel-in-poems and my main character is mad at her father. I have to write a poem showing why she is mad at him.

My next picture book, NEW YEAR AT THE PIER—A Rosh Hashanah Story
comes out in June. One of my friends is making poetry postcards and wanted me to write a poem for one of his postcards. I thought I’d write one that somehow tied into the theme of my book, which is about a wonderful tradition during the Jewish New Year called Tashlich. During Tashlich, you think about the mistakes you’ve made in the past year, apologize to the people you’ve hurt, and then take a piece of bread and throw it into a body of water for each of these mistakes. It’s a wonderful tradition. In my town, 200 of us gather at the ocean, sing songs as we walk to the end of the pier, then toss our bread to the fish below. I wanted to write about saying I’m sorry.

So, first I did what my mentor, Myra Cohn Livingston, taught me…I brainstormed. Myra called this brainstorming the “raw spillage of emotion”—just writing everything you can think of about the topic. I keep writing, trying to get something that I feel passionate about…because I’m going to spend a few hours or days or weeks with this poem—I’d better feel passionate about it!

And actually today my friend apologized to me for knocking over a potted plant and breaking the pot. Honestly, I didn’t care for the pot, and told her this. So even though it was an amazingly fresh example of exactly what I wanted to write about, there wasn’t anything that stirred my blood in this.

I kept digging…and remembered when my friend Debi, who raises California Desert Tortoises, an endangered animal, gave me one as a present. I was thrilled. Her name was Clementine and Debi told me to take good care of her because she could live to be 150 years old. Oh, my! I chopped up broccoli, kale, apples and spinach for her, made her a home in our living room and took her outside to graze on our back lawn. We tortoise-proofed our backyard so she couldn’t wander, and I picked her fresh sugar snap peas—her favorite food—from our garden.

But one day she stayed out in the rain. And the next day she had a runny nose. The following day her eyes didn’t look clear. And the next morning she was dead.

I stood above her, paralyzed. My heart felt wooden. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. I’ve killed her. I’ve killed this creature. I’m a terrible person. What will Debi think of me? I sat down on the wood floor next to my beautiful tortoise and wept.

I didn’t want to eat for days. I couldn’t sleep. I was a murderer. What could I do? How could I make it better? How could I undo this horrible, awful mistake?

I wrote about it. I prayed. I finally called Debi one night. “Do you have a little time? Can I come over and talk to you about something?” My voice trembled.
“Yes.”

I drove to her house and parked. I trudged to her door. I lifted my finger. I pushed the doorbell. I waited in darkness. The porch light flashed on. Debi opened the door. She wrinkled her forehead. “Are you okay?”
“No,” I said, and then I burst out crying. “Clementine died.”
“Oh, dear,” she said. “Oh, dear. How?”
“I think she died from being in the rain,” I said. “I am so sorry. I am so, so, so, so sorry.”
“Oh, honey,” she said, hugging me. “Oh, honey, these things happen. It’s not your fault.”

We talked. I left feeling limp. I also felt better. But I still missed my little dinosaur cow who grazed on my grass.

A few days later Debi called. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “You know how I told you that Clementine would live to be 150 years old?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “She was pretty old when someone gave her to us. So I’ve been thinking. When we gave her to you, maybe she was 149 years old.”

So…I wanted to write a poem about all this. And I wanted to write a SHORT poem. How?I went to my poetry book shelf and pulled down a favorite anthology of poems, The Scott Foresman Anthology of Children’s Literature, co-edited by my teacher, Myra Cohn Livingston. I flipped through and found a lovely poem that said so much in so few words:

Who Am I?by Felice Holman

The trees ask me,
And the sky,
And the sea asks me
Who am I?

The grass asks me,
And the sand,
And the rocks ask me
Who I am.

The winds tells me
At nightfall,
And the rain tells me
Someone small.

Someone small
Someone small
But a piece
of
it
all.

Then, using this structure, I tried to talk about Clementine and feeling bad and about forgiveness. As you’ll see, I ended up changing the structure a bit…but it’s wonderful to have someone else’s poem as a jumping off point.
Here’s my poem:

MY TORTOISE DIEDby April Halprin Wayland

The grass asks me,
And the sugar snap pea
And the cat asks me
Where is she?

The trees tells me
She caught the flu
And the rain tells me
You did all you could do.

Like a dinosaur cow
Little dinosaur cow
My dinosaur cow.

You grazed
on the lawn
And now
you are gone.

The grass tells me,
we wish she lived,
And the winds tell me
We forgive.

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Now it’s your turn:
1) Think of a subject you’d like to write about.
2) Write down everything you can remember about this topic—every detail, every smell, every incident that comes to mind.
3) Choose one incident among all that you’ve written which fires you up.
4) Find a poem you like and type it into a file.
5) Now, using your subject, copy the poem’s structure, meter, use of sounds, and word choices.
6) Read it aloud. (I often read my poems to Rosie, the world’s oldest dog.)
7) Read it again. And again. Change what doesn’t work.
8) Revel in it. Enjoy it. Do a happy poem dance.
9) Share your poem with your friends and family.

© April Halprin Wayland

April Halprin Wayland has published three picture books and an award-winning novel in poems, GIRL COMING IN FOR A LANDING. Her poems are frequently published in CRICKET Magazine and in numerous anthologies.

She is the recipient of the Myra Cohn Livingston Poetry Award, Penn State’s Lee Bennett Hopkins Honor Award for Children’s Poetry, and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Magazine Merit Award six times for Poetry.

She’s also written, performed and produced a rollicking CD/MP3 album (which includes 17 poems, 5 stories and a fiddle tune) http://cdbaby.com/cd/ahwayland which won the National Parenting Publications (NAPPA)’s Gold Award for Storytelling.

Her high-energy lectures and poetry workshops have been popular across the US and Europe. A founding member of the ChildrensAuthorsNetwork.com and TeachingAuthors.com, she has been an instructor in UCLA Extension’s Writer’s Program since 1999.

April and her family love animals. They have a dog, two cats, four turtles, a tortoise and probably 947,001 frogs. NEW YEAR AT THE PIER—a Rosh Hashanah Story, will be published June 2009. Visit her website: www.aprilwayland.com