Loose Leaf Notes

1. Near the end of the Dodd Creek Trail, my friend Juniper and I discovered this newly-added rosy park bench where we sat and did some bird watching, which was mostly bird listening. She pulled up a birdsong app on her phone and we played one of my favorite songbirds, a wood thrush. Soon all the nearby wood thrush in the woods came to answer the call! Listen

2. “Don’t play the alarm call or we’ll scare them all away,” I warned.

3. My all-time favorite songbird is the catbird. We played that too but, apparently, there were none in the woods.

4. We also pulled up a plant identification app and when I got home I looked up the below red-flowered plant that I don’t remember planting. Crocosmia, also known as montbretia, is a small genus of flowering plants in the iris family, related to a wide range of much-loved garden plants including Gladioli, Iris, Crocus, Chasmanthe and Freesia. It is native to the grasslands of southern and eastern Africa, ranging from South Africa to Sudan.

5. Forge or forage?

6. Now that my sons are grown and my grandsons are nearly grown, I have settle for watching my flowers grow. Every morning I walk through the yard to see the new blooms and changes.

7. Poem from Scratch –  / Punch it like a time clock / Time it like boiled eggs / Mix yesterday’s dream / with a sleight of hand / Cross your T’s / and say abracadabra / Pull a rabbit / out of a stranger’s hat

8. After posting the above poem on Poets and Storytellers United, a reader commented, “I do hope you are compiling a book of ars poetica!”

9. I had to look the term up: “An ars poetica poem is a poem examining the role of poets themselves as subjects, their relationships to the poem, and the act of writing. “To write about poetry is to believe that there are answers to some of the questions poets ask of their art, or at least that there are reasons for writing it,” writes Michael Weigers, editor of the anthology This Art: Poems about Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2003). Among the first known treatises on poetry, Horace’s “Ars Poetica” (also referred to as Letters to Piso) is literally translated as “The Art of Poetry” or “On the Art of Poetry.” Composed sometime between 20 B.C.E. and 13 B.C.E., the poem outlines principles of poetry, including knowledge, decorum, and sincerity, and introduced Horace as both a poet and critic. In the piece, he advises poets to read widely, strive for precision, and seek honest criticism.” – More HERE.

10. It was our friend Starroot’s 76th birthday and I couldn’t get the song “76 Trombones Led the Big Parade” out of my head. I wanted to sing it to her instead of “Happy Birthday.” More HERE.

11. Last week I got bit by a tick and pulled it out with tweezers. I told Joe and he said that maybe he got bit too. He looked and found that he had a tick in the same place mine was, just outside the left armpit.

12. The birds are my angels now / There old songs are new / I tell time through the windows / by what flowers are in bloom…

___________Thirteen Thursday