Let it Snow!

Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit Lisa at Steps and Staircases for a tumblr Roundup.

We woke this morning to snow, which is always a newsworthy happening in Alabama! In anticipation, last night many schools instated a 2 hour delay. Now that the snow has actually arrived, some schools are calling it a complete "snow day." Love it!

Of course I had to take a few photographs... tears blurred my eyes because watching the snow drift so gently down fills me with hope for the world.



And then I remembered two new snow books I want to share:

WHEN THE SNOW FALLS by Linda Booth Sweeney, illus. by Jana Christy

This one features a sleepover with a lively Grandma and tight two-word sentences with a rhyming pattern. Here's the opening:


When the snow falls...
Frost paints.Skies gray.Windows sparkle.Snow? Yay!
A lot of strong rhymes and great energy make this one score big points in the re-readability charts.
Also, SNOWBALL MOON by Fran Cannon Slayton, illus. by Tracy Bishop. I confess I haven't read this one yet, just some teasers, but I loved Fran's middle grade novel WHEN THE WHISTLE BLOWS, and this one promises rhyming wonder, and hello "snowball" moon! Isn't that brilliant?! I'll never think of a winter full moon now as anything else. 

If I was really on top of things I would share a fresh-penned original snow poem, but hello, it's snowing, I'm living my poem today! 
I did, however, enter "snow" into the search engine and found a few snowy lines I wrote who-knows-how-many years ago on a morning just like this one. Maybe I will work with them later today? Meanwhile here they are in all their rawness:
When it snowsyou prop the window sashwith a book, 
invite the clean air insidewhere you warm the piano benchwithout him.
The still air ghosts into the roomand carries out with it strands of Schubert.
Your eyelids drift as snowflakes,your cheeks pinkenas your fingers dance --
stillness needs music and music needs stillness,and if he asked you to come back,
you would.
- Irene Latham-----------------------Happy Snow Day! xo