#EquationPoem 18

For National Poetry Month 2021, I’m posting an equation poem each day. Maybe with an image, maybe without. I needed something very accessible and doable this year! Maybe you feel the same way? I’d love for you to join me, and here are several options for sharing your own or your students’ equation poems:

  • in the comments below
  • on social media with #EquationPoem–and be sure to tag me, please! (@LauraPSalas on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook)
  • on the Padlet on my bookpage here

Here’s today’s equation poem. I bought a cheap jigsaw puzzle and ended up with two edge pieces that were the same and one missing edge piece.

And if you love equation poems, check out my Snowman-Cold=Puddle: Spring Equations, published by Charlesbridge and with gorgeous art by Micha Archer.

Snowman - Cold = Puddle: Spring Equations

Happy poeming!

P.S. Click here if you want to see all of this month’s equation poems!

P.P.S. If you like these, you might also love This Plus That, by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Jen Corace, and Mathematickles, by Betsy Franco and Steve Salerno.

10 Responses

  1. Morning prayer + hope = blue sky photos (beginning idea)

    More green + blue sky = spring love

    Morning sunshine + cloudless sky = blossom photos ahead

    Bright sky + growing buds = photographer’s playground

    I decided to include my evolving poems here, just for fun, Laura. I think the last one is closer to what I am thinking.
    As a form I like the equation poem, as a way of getting ideas down as a writing warm up I like them a lot. Quick, focused, etc. I still love the 15 WOL challenge. I have tried (off and on) to write at Margaret’s This Photo Needs a Poem and I enjoy that because it is similar but freer.….I try to save these quick writes to come back to see where they might go. They help is the main point.

    Your puzzle poem makes me think a number of things: one, I am not good at puzzles and don’t have the patience or time to spend, two, a love “hole in the sky” and it makes me think of hole in the heart and hole in our lives and other ideas of holes both positive and negative. It’s a pretty picture, your imperfect puzzle though. I do think though that maybe doing puzzles is good for a specific part of the brain and that my brain needs a challenge perhaps. Thank you!

    1. Janet, I love your evolving poems. Photographer’s Playground is perfect.

    2. Love this bouquet of equation poems, Janet! I agree–the form can make a great warmup:>)

  2. Love this! You’ve got me trying out some equation poems. I even find myself thinking in equations. Yesterday I was planting some new inkberry bushes because
    Berries + Birds = Feast

  3. When that happened to us we used to blame it on the cat! It seems serendipitous that it’s up there in the sky — makes a great poem!

  4. Laura, I have a lot of catching up to do on your equation poems. A hole in the sky is a perfect solution to your equation, which I love. Just like Linda when we’ve lost puzzle pieces, we blamed our cats because I actually saw them knock pieces to the floor.

    puzzle piece + puzzle piece = cat toys In fact, whatever one of our cats, Tigress,

    finds or steals she considers a toy. She does not like the word no. LOL. Below is an equation poem on a subject I found out about today that outraged me.

    wild buffalo + Yellowstone NP = slaughtered I’m working on a longer poem or maybe a book

    about this horrific fact. Yes, in Yellowstone National Park American wild buffalo who are “red listed” by the IUCN and “threatened with near extinction” are rounded up in a bison trap “where they are poked and prodded” and sent to a slaughterhouse. Yellowstone also confines buffalo to quarantine for domestication. There’s even worse done to buffalo in Montana. Checkout http://www.BuffaloFieldCampaign.org, which is a non profit that defends the Yellowstone herds.

    Laura, I hope you don’t mind that I mentioned the above facts that are being done to wild buffalo.

    1. Gail, love your puzzle poem. And that’s awful about the buffalo. How sad that wild bison aren’t protected just because there are good populations of livestock buffalo. :>(

  5. Laura, a hole in the sky is a perfect solution to your equation poem. I have a lot of catching up to do on your blog. Just like Linda we’ve always blamed the cats for missing puzzle pieces. We have one named, Tigress, who I have seen knock down pieces to play with. She actually considers anything she “accidentally” finds or steals a toy. Right now she is blocking my monitor so I can’t see what I’m writing. LOL

    puzzle piece + puzzle piece = cat toy

    rabbit fur mouse + purse = surprise Lovee, our seventeen-old-cat when she was young

    surprised me one day with her favorite toy in my pocketbook. Thank you for the inspiration, Laura.

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