Believe

Macy's Believe campaign has teamed up with the Make-a-Wish Foundation this Christmas to help make wishes come true! Write a letter to Santa, stamp it, and bring it to any Macy's store to drop it off in Santa's letterbox. (They'll be delivered to the North Pole, guaranteed.)

Macy's will donate $1 (up to $1,000,000) to the Make-a-Wish Foundation for every letter received. For more information about the Make-a-Wish Foundation, visit http://www.wish.org/.

*

(ps) My sister is the newest addition to the readergirlz street team! It's very exciting. Please stop by her blog to congratulate her!

Lines*

sorry! the poem's on its way to another home. maybe next time you'll catch one before it leaves. :)

*I didn't submit this for Poetry Friday because I will be taking this one down soon. This piece is a culmination of a lot of things that have been sitting around in my mind and in my drafts for a while now, and all the fragments needed a place to go. I figured that maybe if I combined them I'd come up with something, and I guess it worked. (As always, please do not reprint without permission.)

Thankful

I have a lot to be thankful for today. I'm so lucky, and that's why I create a list every Thanksgiving of things I have to be thankful for:

• you! Thank you for visiting, commenting, subscribing -- every reader counts.
• my family, the most amazing group of people I'll ever meet
• life. I'm enjoying it so far.
• love
• books
• music. songs. tunes that get stuck in your head.
• rain and snow! I can't live without my precipitation.
• warmth and light
• my sister (Yes, she's family, but she's my biggest inspiration.)
• laughter
• holidays (especially Christmas!)
• winter
• Apologies to an Apple!
• people who believe(d) in me
• people who make me laugh
• a roof over my head and food on the table
  
• and everything else in my life that I can't remember right now.

What are you thankful for this Thanksgiving?

(p.s. Drive over to Notes from the Nerdette to read bookbutterfly's interview with my ever-entertaining sister. In fact, the interview is entertaining as well -- it involves algebraic equations for Golpalott's Third Law, mind reading skills, American Idol...oh yeah, and (awful) live performances from Taylor Swift.)

Home

winter candles burning.

it rains steadily outside,

darker and darker.

Stay

Stay.
But don't turn away
from the city, from the dragon-smoke
from the kind old folk
stay, just one more day.
Don't leave my heart, under,
don't leave me wondering
because I can't see why
you think it's over.

This is what happens when you all put your heads together. Beautiful, isn't it? Thank you to Debbie, Kelli, Kirthi, Q, Danielle, Erin, Priya, and Myrna for participating!

eta: There was a flurry of comments after the final date. Unfortunately, I will not be adding them in, as they don't fall within the span of four days I set aside for the poem. Thank you for participating, but they aren't part of the poem. (This applies to all entries after the deadline for every collaborative poem I do in the future as well.) 

Here we go again

Our last collaborative poem was amazing! I've never done anything like it before, but everyone responded wholeheartedly and it turned out to be an incredible poem!

Here we go again! The rules:

You don't have to be a poet to participate. In the comments for this post, add one line of poetry. Make sure it fits with the lines that others have added before you (and please don't copy and paste the lines before yours!). It doesn't have to be the most astounding, mind-blowing line ever created. It doesn't even have to be "good." Make today the day you start writing poetry, if you never have.


I'm leaving this poem open for four days. You have until 2 p.m. Pacific Time (5 p.m. Eastern) on November 18 to submit your line.

Here's my opening line:

Stay.

Go!

Last night

Streetlights on the highway

burn in the dark.

Three lanes stretch forward,

taking us somewhere, anywhere.

(Thanks to Holly Cupala for linking to "Carving" at Brimstone Soup!)

"Carving"

This is a collaboration between Erin and me. We decided to write a poem together on the first of June, and we alternated, one of us writing a stanza and then sending it back to the other person for them to add their new lines. We finished on October 24 and did some last-minute touch-ups and edits.

It was a very cool experience to team up with Erin and put together this piece. She has talent, and she's so dedicated that I have to admit she made my job pretty easy. It was so much fun, and I think I'd definitely be interested in doing a project like this again.

Carving

yesterday,
sitting in a plum tree,
I saw a strange miracle

under cold sweet sky,
empty dark air
a shawl around shaking shoulders.

stars spell my name
not the name
you used to call me
with your rough lips
and uncomfortable laugh

I leave behind
what I can't remember
in a sea of
broken
lost
praying

even so,
I wonder if you knew
if you knew what it meant
how each word
tore
scratched
clawed

do you remember
how much it hurt?
what did i leave
b
e
h
i
n
d
?

but I look at the name
the one I will never tell you
and something inside me
whispers,
I will be okay

my shirt smells
of you. are we in a new
world?

I wish the answer were simple,
a soft "yes" whispered by weary lips
on orange-tinted breath

I wish I knew, wish this life
was in the air like strands of cold
fog drifting away

but all I have in this moment
is dirt and tree bark
under my fingers,
rough but real
unfair but tangible
something to hold onto
when you're not here

the days washed away beside
us, winters and springs and summers
that we never cared about.
in those black-and-white minutes,
we belonged to ourselves and
nobody else.

it was like being a child,
sand castles and strawberry ice cream
and knees skinned on pavement.
together we defied time,
two Peter Pans hand-in-hand.
 
I wish it were still
postcard-perfect. Maybe I want
something else. I'm not sure.
It's called insecurity, isn't it?—

—this wishing for things not there
when all I have to hold
are five letters
and a tangled possibility

copyright Erin McIntosh and Maya Ganesan (2009)

(Poetry Friday roundup at Wild Rose Reader)

Play On

Carrie Underwood's third album, "Play On," was released at midnight today. It's an incredible album, and it's full of gold. If you haven't figured out yet that I'm an enormous Carrie Underwood fan, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for evidence.

I made sure I purchased the album as soon as it was available on iTunes last night. I'm currently listening to "Play On" and I can safely say it's my favorite CD ever.

Go get it. You won't regret it, I promise. It's amazing.

Collaboration rocks

We are alive.
We sift sand through each other's parted fingers,
grasping at imaginary thoughts that
sharpen
as we walk through the
shortening days
fearing nothing but
fearfulness, and
the growing nearness of when
the stars stop shining.
We do not fear, for we live
and dream of bursting through our sky blue shell
to drift, bleached logs set to shore,
our hands tipped skyward,
reaching for everything that could be.

Our readers' collaborative poem! Thank you to the 13 folks who participated! I LOVE the poem that came out of everyone's two cents, and I think I'm going to do this again because it was super-fun to see all the one-liners pouring in.

HUGE HUGE thanks to the participants: Dana, Danielle, Myrna, Erin, cuileann, Beth, Q, Debbie, Priya, Georgie, briarcat, Deb, and Emma!

1

It's November 1st. I'm celebrating one year of solid blogging today. I don't have a huge party planned, but I do write poetry.

(The idea is taken from ReadWritePoem. I thought it was a cool idea, so I'm stealing it. It's probably been done before, though.) You don't have to be a poet to participate. In the comments for this post, add one line of poetry. Make sure it fits with the lines that others have added before you (and please don't copy and paste the lines before yours!). It doesn't have to be the most astounding, mind-blowing line ever created. It doesn't even have to be "good." Make today the day you start writing poetry, if you never have.

You have until 9 a.m. Pacific Time (12 p.m. Eastern) on November 2nd to add your line to the readers' collaborative poem. Get your friends and family to participate. The more the merrier! The compiled poem will be posted sometime in the morning on the 2nd. (Please don't post as Anonymous -- at the end of the poem, I'll be adding credits, and it's frustrating to have multiple Anons.)

I'll kick it off with my line:

We are alive.

It's on!

(photo credit)