Cookie Butter (Slice 13 of 31)

This post is a part of the Slice of Life challenge which is hosted on the Two Writing Teachers blog.  The month of March the challenge is to write a blog post a day.

Today for my writing time I decided to try an ode to a common thing.  I am trying to introduce my students to more poetry forms and came across the lesson on odes in my copy of Lessons that Change Writers by Nancie Atwell.  She uses some of Pablo Nerudas poems to have students try this form and write poems about ordinary things.

My poem is really rough.  I was just trying this out and wanted to play with the ode.  It is by no means finished and will be a work in progress for a while to come.  I am glad I tried this because it is a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Ode to Cookie Butter

You tantalize me with
your gingery excellence.
One swipe of you on my bread
and I am rapturous with delight.
How can I ever have lived
without this amazing spread.
As your flavor sticks
to the roof of my mouth,
I contemplate how best
to use you next.
An apple, perhaps
will be the receptacle
to receive your velvety
delicious
sugar taste.
You hail from Trader Joe's
What magnificent creature
first dreamt of you
and worked
to make your sweet perfection?
As I bite into your luscious
goodness my mind starts to wander
and I wonder
how it was possible
that I never bought you before.

Obviously, as I said before, this poem is still very rough.  I think I will bring this in to my classroom and show students my first attempts and then work on revising it in front of them.  I am envisioning a class shared writing experience: Ode to Takis.

We had such fun with false apology poems.  I hope we can play with this form and have fun also.