Beached in My Heart

Here's a poem I wrote as an exercise for a weekly art history class that two other moms and I were teaching our homeschool children, based on the art series "Picturing America" from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

When we go to the Charles Sheeler painting, "American Landscape, 1930", which shows huge factories, we read Carl Sandburg's poem "Chicago" as a literary piece to go with it.  We then each wrote a poem on a geographic point personal to ourselves, based on the format of Sandburg's first stanza.

Here's mine, which I include in this blog, because it holds echoes of those early Michigan trails upon which I found myself as a child.

Michigan

Petoskey keeper for the world.

Girl-maker, stower of dreams,

Player with lakes and glacial streams.

Autumnal, burnished, coppery,

State of deciduous childhood,

Green as a canoe -

Beached in my heart

Photo borrowed from www.trailblazerproducts.com.