This week’s Sharing Our Stories Magic prompt is “Outside.” This weekend I participated in The Poetry Marathon, and I decided to go outside awhile for one of my poems and see what poetry I found. This post was also inspired by Kate Messner and her #teacherswrite prompt for this week.

Outside

It’s an oven outside
The air mostly hot, still–
what you might expect
at noon near the summer
solstice on a desert island.
Onions are frying in ghee
for someone’s lunch,
making my mouth water.
I notice the oleander,
nature’s poison,
wondering again why they are
so widely used for landscaping
in family gardens here.

I wanted to sit and observe nature.
Shade was not to be found, though,
so I kept walking
and went to school
to pick up a letter of recommendation
our departing principal had readied for me.
I sat outside after, enjoying some welcome
shade–the first I had seen.
I read the letter. Along with a lot of
Denise’s there was also one Angela tucked in,
a stray from a previous letter, cut-and-pasted.
I returned it to the secretary. She’ll get it fixed.

The birds seemed to be enjoying the shade
of the frangipani tree
and delighting in the promise
of the fruit-laden palms.

I’m joining an open community of writers over at Sharing Our Stories: Magic in a Blog. If you write (or want to write) just for the magic of it, consider this your invitation to join us. #sosmagic