Below you can find a poem that I wrote by spending some time outside and observing the beauty of the natural world around me. I love flowers, I have may pictures of flowers that I have taken on my phone or camera. There is something about them that just draws my eye to them, they are just truly beautiful to me, so it makes sense that I would write a poem about them.
Here is a picture of a flower I chose to focus on:
Here is my drawing of it:
Here is my poem it inspired:
Dreamer
Standing
out from the rest.
Making
its presence known.
Revealing
its deep secret
of its past life.
The dark marks
show its true self
of a time when
it once roamed
the dry grasslands
as the fastest cat
lurking for its next prey.
Now it just dreams.
Dreams
of a time that
once was.
A time that
was different.
Not better
Not worse
just...different.
Reflection on this experience
To me this experience was really positive and it taught me a lot. I never knew what could happen if I just took the time to really engage with nature and try to capture its beauty. By illustrating the flower that I found, it caused me to focus on aspects of it that I might usually just pass up. As I was drawing it, I looked in really close at some of the details that I could find. I saw that the petals had very faint lines on it that reminded me of a map. That was one element that I was exploring as I was thinking of ideas on what to write about my flower, but then as I leaned in more and starting adding all the details, I noticed the darker pink markings it had on some of the petals, I thought that was very interesting. These flowers grow in our yard every year and they are one of my favorites, but I never notice the subtle pattern it had just on the inside of the petals. This really intrigued me, especially because it reminded me of the pattern of cheetahs. Once I made that connection, my mind started racing with ideas and that is what really inspired my poem.
Doing an activity like this with students could lead to a lot of thinking and really help them to focus on the details. It is also just a great way to show students all the things they can notice and see when they truly take time to just observe and be in the moment. I think that this type of activity would produce a lot of creative pieces from students and really allow them to have some freedom over their observations and the inspiration they inspire. I think for students to feel truly successful with this activity the teacher would need to model for them how to take observations and turn them into a poem or poems. When doing so, taking risks and trying different things out to show the students that it is okay to take risks and try new things. Additionally, showing students work from other students is going to help them a lot and help them to have an idea how to create their own pieces. By showing multiple works on observational poetry, the students can model their own pieces or thinking off of others until they feel more confident in their own writing. Even when I was writing my own piece, I looked at what other had done to kind of get me started and then a spark went off in my head and I completely changed my first poem to create this one instead. I kind of needed the work of others to get me started, but once I started I was able to turn my words completely around and create a piece that was mine and just how I wanted it.