I’ve been doing my best to organize my stuff (especially papers) before the fall semester begins.  In going through the huge plastic tubs full of notes, documents, writing exercises, random movie ticket stubs, drawings from nephews, etc. in order to categorize everything into folders, I’ve run across a lot of things I’d forgotten about.  Some of the things I’d forgotten I had, I’ve been so happy to rediscover.  Letters from my family from times when we were far apart, comic books my nephew drew and mailed to me, notes from high school classes with my friends…sure have brought a smile to my face and, at times, tears to my eyes in the past few weeks.

One of the really fun things I rediscovered was a set of 10-word poems that my mom and I wrote.  It’s a writer-nerd game that any number of writers can play together:  Each person writes their name on a sheet of paper and passes it to however many other writers there are.  When each sheet has a title from each person (except the person whose name is on it) it gets passed back to the owner.  When you get your titles back, you have to write a 10-word poem for each title.  Sometimes, this gets extremely silly.  Sometimes, it gets unexpectedly deep!  And mind you, these aren’t haiku – you don’t have to count syllables, just words, and you can break the lines up however you want.

Here are a couple of our silly results:

Gluttonous Carnivorous Extravaganza

Meat! Meat! Meat!

What joy!

People everywhere!

Title by Sara Marian, Poem by Marian Allen

Penguin

A business suit and

A cheerful disposition —

What excellent company!

Title by Marian Allen, Poem by Sara Marian