a WILD lesson

a WILD lesson

For more articles on today’s topic prompt – wild –
look for them at Live Your Poem, tamed by Irene Latham,
who is celebrating a 10th Anniversary of Live your Poem!

I

Wild oceans

c. all rights reserved
Jan Godown Annino

At graduation from Coastal Systems Class last

week, I brought some of my mollusks. The animals were long dead (not by

my hand.)

(I am holding my rugged old conch)

Ever since my pudgy toddler hand picked up a Jersey shore

clam, I’ve been lured to shores to collect more.

c.2015 all rights eserved JanGodownAnnino

My pink Queen conch here ( found empty on Cayman Island sands)

amplified a traditional Pomp + Circumstance played

on another student’s phone, during the awarding of our certificates.

The pale, rugged Queen conch, a family relic from the mid-1800s

(fuzzy on the decades) found a student who knew what to do with

the sliced-off tip.

She got everyone’s attention.

c. 2015 all rights reserved
Rugged queen conch is a horn,
again

The original owner sounded it long ago on the Delaware River

as he rounded bends. Family legend says this river trumpet belonged

to our relative, maybe even the boatman who used it as a horn.

I feel honored that it is entrusted to me.

A Wild Horn, Plenty
by Jan Godown

Conch spiral leads me inward

unwinding a calcium chamber

a big grit at birth

queenly large at death

How many years did this

creature vacuum sea grass beds

before a plucking by man

from coastal waters

I ask it

Who ate you

Who sliced your tip, making you into a tool

How many times did your dead chamber

trumpet

Aural warning of a barge’s path

Siren saving river travelers lives

Many times I pet your shell, wondering this

©2015JanGodownAnnino

II

Wild child

You will likely have similar remembrances to mine,
of two often-read children’s books with wild in their titles.
So I won’t spend a buncha time with them here.

WILD WILD SUNFLOWER CHILD, ANNA is probably the first
book I read our daughter that she remembers me reading
to her. When I want to look at it, I can’t find it among the
hundreds of books on my wall of shelves. It’s in her room.
And she is post-college now.

It helped that her name is Anna.
But it more perfectly worked that Nancy White Carlstrom’s
tumbling words celebrating a child in nature, matched our Anna’s whirling
days splashing and dashing. But a child of any name and their parent
will want to run into the wild with this one. The crownng piece of the creativity
is the abandon Jerry Pinkney brings to his paintings of character Anna at the babbling
brook, blowing on the dandelion, always a spinning, turning, wild child.
I hope this will call you to go back to be wild with this book again or meet it, fresh.
Here is a peek of what awaits in it, by Nancy White Carlstrom.

c. Nancy White Carlstrom and Jerry Pinkney, WILD WILD SUNFLOWER CHILD ANNA

Lifting up the pressing stone
beetles rushing giddy

Silent spinning
buzzing, blinking
breathing rainbows
©Nancy White Carlstrom

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE is even more wild a walk
through childhood than I remember, when read by
wild man actor Christopher Walken.
That’s all I’m sayin’. Go listen to what Walken does
with Maurice Sendak’s masterpiece. WILD!

And remember to congratulate Irene Latham at Live Your Poem (link above)