50+ Lifestyles

Max’s Musings

By Max Molleston

Some writers are born with creative genes, or a heritage encouraging them to launch into writing as a profession, pushing into producing poetry, short stories or novels, stage plays, movies or music. Others gain skills as technical writers, and spend careers writing and editing special subject matter, like cookbooks or somewhat complicated directions assembling something, or move into science language, or write textbooks. It is most important to learn to complete an idea by describing it to be understood. The more language we learn and know, the better we can describe situations to our colleagues by speaking to them, or composing an explanation. A few months ago, I came across a newspaper article describing the effects of ample rainfall we might not have expected. It was an effort by Orlan Love, an author and veteran writer for The Gazette, a regional eastern Iowa newspaper published in Cedar Rapids. Orlan Love writes about happenings around us in nature. Some is about fishing various locations and at other times about farming situations.

He may write articles about something relatively new in ag ideas and presents the concept clearly, as his professional skills permit. After reading his article about the wonders of nature, when plenty of rainfall has graced a habitat, I wrote to him at The Gazette saying, “Many times in your writing in nature there is a tone of poetry.” This was a longer article in a Sunday edition. I referred to it as the Sunday Rhubarb Column. I selected what follows to shape into a poem. I just wanted to show Orlan  how this particular writing could slip into a form of poetry. Keep in mind this is his writing.

We are talking about ample rain,
warm humid days and temperate nights
fueling riotous growth.
Lawns that lay dormant
through much of April
now look shaggy
shortly after they’ve been mowed.

The Rhubarb patch barely above ground
when last you looked,
sports pie-suitable stalks
topped by leaves
the size of elephant ears.

Ferns that weren’t there
when you raked the lawn last week
have unfurled to 2-foot heights.
Luminous white morels
seem to spring whole in damp depressions
where, you would swear,
nothing grew the day before.

Trees with barely discernible
green corona a week earlier
have burst into full leaf,
their spent bud shells
blanketing the sidewalks,
their effulgent crowns transforming
the skyline of every small town.

The arrangement of his writing into a poem is my design, which I submitted in my letter to Orlan Love. One of his words expressing the greenery is effulgent. My handy-at-all-times dictionary and thesaurus read effulgent like this: shine, radiance, brilliance. That word is worthy for a ride in a poem. In my letter to Orlan I wrote:”the choice of words to enrich these bursts of vegetation may have come naturally, whereas a poet, such as I am, would have run over the construction two or three times to get closer to what I thought was wanted in descriptive terms. Most of our (meaning me and others who write) efforts, daily or whenever else, are of the reporting nature, our best descriptive skills used to help our readers, listeners, and viewers stay apprised and interested.

I want to help my readers understand and try their skills, developed over the years as professionals and amateurs. Skills can be focused elsewhere, like building a poem. Nowadays a poem can take almost any form. The importance of the action is to get it out of yourself and on paper, composing on a PC, or writing with a pencil or ballpoint. Maybe your next effort can be an entertaining poem or short story centered on the family gathering around the Thanksgiving table. The annual celebrations have been launched by season and tradition focusing on people we love, giving us ideas for presents for  special little and larger folks we care about. December has lots of charm and very
special times. Join me here, next month.