Hello everyone !   Grace here to introduce you to our guest blogger, Patti Wolf!

In 2012-2013 a British nature documentary series sponsored Nature’s Microworlds. The thirteen thirty-minute episodes focused on different wildlife regions: microclimate of the Galapagoes, grasslands of the Serengeti, the Amazon rainforest, kelp in Monterey Bay, Okavango Delta which empties into the Kalahari Desert.   These and the Arctic wilderness of Svalbard were some the featured ecosystems.

 

Hi, I’m Patti Wolf from wolfsrosebud hosting today from the state of Wisconsin where spring is in full swing and hoping to get everyone out of their individual pubs to do a little exploring, of sorts. If you can’t, feel free to use one of my micro photos. Photography is something fairly recent in my daily life. It’s a nice art to add to poetry or to be inspired by it.

I’m six decades old and have written or taught writing for most of that time.  I find the poetry form very easy to insert into a busy schedule which includes watching grandkids weekly, representing Asian exchange students and other domestic chores that leave little time to rewrite and edit. Poetry offers a small package, which is easier to finish. I’ve been blogging since 2010, with only a few breaks. That’s enough about me. Time to get inspired!

 

When my children were being home educated, we planned a group field trip to a local camp ground. Workshops were offered to the different age groups. I remember the older students were asked to study micro science for a time. With magnifying glasses they had been asked to get down and dirty with the ground. Now I know this is a difficult thing for a teenager to stay still for more than fifteen minutes, but I was amazed how they really got into the project after settling into their task.

As poets, we experience the world with our senses. Some have a musical ear while others have an artistic eye.   There are others who explore the world with the sense of touch, while some have a sense of smell like the best of chefs. We use those senses to capture our everyday life and share them to anyone willing to read our take on the world.  Today, let’s use those senses and shrink down a frame of our reality into smaller portions of the world.    

Take a look at a few lines from other poets:

Blueberries by Robert Frost

“You ought to have seen what I saw on my way
To the village, through Mortenson’s pasture to-day:
Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb,
Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum
In the cavernous pail of the first one to come!”

Notice how Frost slows his pace down on the way to the village. He mingles with something he sees, relates to it and describes it in a way one could not unless they had stopped to enjoy the blueberries. There’s excitement in his find making the reader want to join him.

A Noiseless Patient Spider by Walt Whitman

“A NOISELESS, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.”

Here Whitman has us entangled in his web of words. We see them, feel them, and are aware of the intricate making of the delicate art of a web.

Sweet and Low by Kathleen Everett

“One by one,
the evening stars ignite,
torched by dusk’s retreat
into twilight.

The celestial lamplighter whistles,
sweet and low,
his lullabies to the evening stars
as he makes his way across the night’s sky.

Everett takes a simple evening sky and brings it to life. Not only does she use the sense of sight, but she arouses our hearing. Then she brings the verse to tell a story, as if we were watching a live drama and had been drawn into the action.

Today I’d like you to go outdoors and get reacquainted with nature outside your back door. It does not matter what season it is in your part of the world, nor if it’s early morning or twilight. Sit and linger for a while in one spot and drink it in. Too often we walk by the tree blooming and don’t appreciate the details unfolding before our eyes. What does it smell like, do we hear critters housed in its branches, how does the bark feel, or what geometric shapes are involved in the blooming processes? Share a little of your part of the world with all of us and see if we can have more than a series of thirteen microworlds to enjoy!

Thank you, Patti !   Our challenge is to write a microworld poem inspired by the post of our guest blogger, Patti Wolf.   If you decide to use her pictures, please credit her by providing a link to her blog.