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May 11, 2017

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By&4Kids, Photography, Poetry, Romance

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Fragrance Fandango

Pink Lilacs in bloom

cherry-petal pink
lilacs tease green hearts,
kissing and telling

forsythia curls fall first
scattering like sunbeams

Copyright 2017 Brenda Davis Harsham

Notes: Happy Poetry Friday and thanks to Tara Smith at A Teaching Life for hosting! In honor of Mother’s Day this May 14, my daughter and I each wrote a poem for this picture, taken outside my door. Mine’s above and here is my daughter’s:

Fragrance glows and
flows in the air
like a little animal
has freed a song.

by A. Harsham, age 8

And a bonus snippet from People by Charlotte Zolotow which describes how my daughter makes me feel:

Some people touch your hand
and music fills the sky.

(Found in Knock at a Star: A Child’s Introduction to Poetry, X.J. and Dorothy Kennedy, Little Brown, 1999.)

My poem is a Tanka, a Japanese poetry form that has five lines with maximum syllable counts per line of 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7. In other words, a Tanka is a haiku followed by two seven-syllable lines in the second stanza. Purists find fault with any rhyming within the poem. The third line is intended to be a turning point, or a pivot, about which the meaning of the poem turns or changes.

66 thoughts on “Fragrance Fandango”

  4. Tanka is such an interesting form. I like the idea that you have a haiku, and then the final two lines serving as a kind of commentary. Your daughter’s idea that a fragrance can glow — a beautiful way of describing scent.

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  10. No surprise you are raising a poet! (And ironic how you can see what age does to us — yours ends in a fall from beauty, and hers sends beauty bounding out into the world!)

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  12. Love both poems. Your daughter’s ‘like an animal has freed a song’ is a wow moment! Love it! Your ‘cherry-petal pink’, and ‘forsythia curls’ are lovely. (But I keep wanting to read, ‘kiss and tell’. :P) Smiles for beautiful mother/daughter moments.

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  18. How much do I love that you and your little girl write poems together! What a precious Mother’s Day present to each other. And what a wonderful gift to me, because the lilac bush that flourished in my backyard is one of my most fragrant and treasured memories of childhood. Thanks to you both. 🙂

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  21. Love is all through this, Brenda. Knock At A Star is a favorite book, and your lilacs could inspire many a poem. I love each one, “cherry-petal pink” and “freed a song”, perfect!

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    • Thanks, Linda. Knock At A Star is a wonderful book, light, merry and full of good tips. My daughter wanted to get more “Poem Books” from the library because she’s read all of mine. When we went to the shelf, she wanted the thickest she could find, so she would be able to read a lot of poems. 🙂

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  25. That is one BEAUTIFUL lilac bush! The white lilacs in front of the library have just bloomed and the fragrance is heavenly. It’s great that you and your daughter write together and create memories.

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