It's been so long...

Hello! It's been soooo long since I've made a poetry post, so I'll just show you my recent poems. All of these are written by me. Did I mention that I love to write poetry?

Texas February Mornings
Cinquain

Winter
Mornings: Texas
Freezing! 30 degrees!
Below zero? No way! Think of...
Iceland!

Math
Senryu

Math, I detest it.
Fractions, Decimals, Square Roots
Plus signs everywhere

The fate of Spring
Limerick

There once was a baby named Spring,
Who wanted to go see the King.
So she sent him a letter,
asking "Please, would he let her?"
But the king said "No, You poor thing!"

Hope you like them!! (I know they aren't great) :(
Louisa

The Gym by night Day 5

That night, Alex took me aside to her new bedroom. We had only recently been given our own rooms, for our 12^th birthday. As I walked and Alex walked in a backbend position, I thought about tonight. We were going to meet in front of my house at 10:00 and then we would walk to the gym.

“Kerry!” This was Alex, speaking urgently. She kicked over, landing perfectly.

“KERRY! EARTH TO KERRY!” I came to with a start.

“What?”

“You can’t go out tonight! You’d get in big trouble if you were caught. Believe me, I know Coach Chip. Also, you don’t have a key to the gym.”

“Well-“

“Kerry!”

I sighed. “I guess you’re right, Alex.” She almost always is.

After dinner, I called Ana. I told what Alex had said.

She totally understood.

“Actually, I just thought of that myself. I was about to call you. I wasn’t too sure about that plan, anyway,” She said, “So I thought of a better plan. Every other Wednesday is Mrs. Kingsley’s, the lady who works in the office, day off. So maybe after Wednesday Workout, we can sneak in there and look through the office. “

“Great idea. I can come then. What time?”

“Well, Summer Wednesday Workout goes from 7:30 in the morning to 10:00. You might want to come around 9:15, ‘cause my 8:45 Beam coach lets me go early a lot.” I heard someone calling Ana’s name in the background.

“Gotta go. See you on Wednesday?

“Right. Bye!”

“Bye!”

                                                                                        ***

That night in bed, I was thinking about what sport I should try to replace ballet. I’d already tried basketball, and decided it wasn’t for me, being really bad at it. Swimming? No, I’d never been a super strong swimmer. Softball and soccer were out of the question, I couldn’t really think of any other types of dance I wanted to do, and definitely NOT handball. What then? I had a growing idea inside me.

The next morning, I woke up at 5: 00 A.M. I went across the hallway to the computer, went on YouTube, and searched Rhythmic Gymnastics. I had heard Ana and Alex talking about it, and it sounded fascinating to me. A whole bunch of videos of Worlds and Nationals popped up and I clicked on one that said “Team Russia Hoops and Ribbons 2010 Worlds”. I waited breathlessly for the ad to finish, and then gasped as I saw 5 teenage girls in super fancy leotards walk on to the podium, each carrying either a purple ribbon on a stick or an ivory colored hoop. Some music started, and they started half dancing, half gymnastics, to the music. I was transfixed from the moment it started to the last moment of the video. I watched it 3 more times, and each time I sat spellbound watching them. ‘I could totally rock this’, I thought, and I knew this was what I wanted to do. After the 5^th time, I googled ‘famous rhythmic gymnasts’. While it was loading, I thought about how I sometimes felt left out, because my best friend and my twin sister both at the gym every day. A bunch of articles came up about famous Russian rhythmic gymnasts, all in Russian. I retyped and added ‘American’. Here were some articles about Mary Sanders and Julie Zetlin. Hmmm… they were the only American ones who had gone to the Olympics in a long time. Well, I would change that. I would go in 2016! I resolved to talk to my mom about it, and go to the gym with Alex as soon as she got up to go, in more or less 1 hour, and have a conversation with the teacher. But maybe I should retry Artistic Gymnastics first. I decided to ask Ana to show me some skills; perhaps some bars jump, or something.

                                                                                           ***

That morning at the gym, I asked Ana to show me some skills. She told me to go to one of the elite gymnasts because they were more experienced than her and Alex.  She pointed to a teenage girl with dark brown hair and braces. “That’s Sabrina. She did the Olympic trials in June, but missed by this much.”

“Okay!

“But you need to warm up and stretch, first. That’s really important, ‘cause if you don’t, you can get seriously injured.

“OF COURSE! I was only in ballet for 10 years!”

I jogged around the gym with her 4 or 5 times, and then she showed me some basic gymnastics stretches for your wrists, ankles, neck, feet, and arms.

“Next you have to do muscle-building exercises.” She grasped a thick rope. “See if you can climb this rope. Race you to the top!!!” And with that, she jumped onto the rope, and started to shin up it towards the green bell. I lightly touched the cord and tried to hold myself up on it. I did it! I started pulling myself upwards just as Ana rang the bell. Oh, well. Climbing a rope is harder than it looks. You must first hold yourself up with your legs straddled around it.  Then you must let go with one hand, in order to reach higher. You have to do the same thing over and over and over and over until you get to the top.

“YAY!” I thought, as I reached the top. Then the thought struck me: How was I going to get down?

By then, Alex had reached the ground. “What’s taking you so long?” She called up to me.

“I can’t get down!” My muscles started burning, because I had been holding myself up with them for so long.

“Just try to take it one step at a time.”

I tried. FAIL! Ana looked desperately up at me. I could tell she was nervous that her coach would come over.

“Maybe I could just jump. I’m not that high up anymore…”

“I guess. But be careful!”

I took a deep breath, and flew down. I landed perfectly. A stick! I held up my arms, saluting. TA-DA!

“Great. But now you need to go talk to Sabrina.”

“Okay!”

I approached the teenaged girl in a pink tank leotard. She was talking to another girl, an Asian girl who looked to be about 14.

“Excuse me, I said, “My friend Ana said you would help me learn some new skills.”

“Oh! Your name is…”

“Kerry.”

“All right, what kind of stuff do you want to learn?”

Continued story Day 3

“He raised it so high that many of the people that had been with him forever quit. I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it, you know with Alex and everything.”

“Anastasia! What are you doing? If you want that double twister ready by Pacific Rim, you need to practice! You hear me? Practice!” A bald man with a stubbly beard and an earring came up to us, shaking his fist. ”And Visa Championships are coming up, too. You want to be on the National Team, don’t you?”

”Y..yes. I’m sorry, Coach Chip! I was just trying to talk to my best friend that I haven’t seen in FIVE YEARS!”

“Well, talk to her later. You need to get to get working. Alex, what are you doing? You botched that tumbling pass again!” He ran over to where Alex, my twin sister, was practicing.

Ana saluted and stood tall. “Yes Sir!” We both giggled. Ana went back to practicing.

I was identical to Alex, and she had been in gymnastics since she was two years old with me. I quit after the first year because I wanted to do ballet, which I ended up doing for nine years. I had been forced to quit last year because I tore a ligament in my arm. Right now I was kind of bummed, because I was out of my favorite thing to do. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next.

Ana came jogging over. “How did that look?”, she asked.

“Ummm…fine”, I said, feeling guilty for getting lost in thought and not watching Ana’s routine.

“Oh, no!”, Ana said,.

“What?”

“Here comes Hannah, the coach’s daughter. She’s a lot like her dad. I haven’t seen her in five years. You’ll recognize her.”

I remembered seeing her at Alex’ gymnastics meets. She was tall and plump with blonde curls. She was always bragging that, although she was a year older than us, she was a level 4. Most 7-year-olds are level 4’s. She sidled up to us now.

“Well, look who’s back. Little Miss Level 2.”

Ana tightened her ponytail.

“Well, actually, while we lived in Romania, I was advanced up to level 10.”

“Mmm-hmm. I’m sure, Hannah said tartly, as she jumped up on the bar and fell off, “that if I was seen with a girl who had to compete for Romania, I would go to bed without dinner.”

And with that she crisply walked away.

                                                                                       ***

That night, I walked home from the gym with Alex and Ana.

“Ana, I said as we walked around a puddle,“If you don’t tell me something, I’ll call you Stacy.” It was an old joke. Everyone knew that Ana hated that name.

“NO! What should I tell you?

“Keep telling me about why your dad went missing.”

“OK. So where was I? Oh, yeah. So I said he raised his tuition. The next thing he did was accept a lot more people, so the gym was really crowded. But that didn’t matter as much. Anyway, because he raised the tuition, we couldn’t pay for it any more. So my dad went to California to try to find work, and for some insane reason, he didn’t want anyone to know why he left.”

“I can understand that,” Alex said quietly.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“So this was all before we moved, and of course he couldn’t find any work, and so we moved to Romania because he wanted me to be at a cheaper gym, and because he heard that there were good jobs there.” Ana paused, pondering the thought. “We got to Romania and we lived in a really crummy apartment because they couldn’t pay for my gymnastics otherwise; He never did find a job there, and when you emailed me that he lowered his tuition, my parents practically got on the next plane here.”

I laughed. Ana’s parents were very eccentric sometimes, I imagined it was sometimes embarrassing for Ana.

“The thing is, no one knows why he had to make it more expensive, and everyone at the gym is practically sick with curiosity. I wish there was some way to find out.”

“Ana, there is! All we have to do is go there at night, and look through his stuff!” This was I, unflinchingly suggesting this although I barely knew him.

“Well…I guess it could be a start. But if anybody sees us, we’re done for.”

“Meet at my front door at 10:00 tonight?”

“Sure. You too, Alex?

“No Way.”

See, Alex is really cautious. She and I are twins, but we couldn’t be less alike. I like adventure, while she only does what is absolutely necessary. By then we had gotten to Ana’s new house, and we bid her goodbye.

“See you tonight?

“I guess. Alex, don’t tell anybody, okay?

“Okay…”

“Bye!

My sisters guest post

Hi! Happy New Year!
So, I have five brothers and sisters, and one of them, my ten year old sister, is a budding poet. She is going to do a guest post about Acrostic Poetry, a really interesting form. It's all yours,Girl!!!!

"Hi! I am the 'Girl' that my sister talks about:)
I am going to tell you about an acrostic poem.

 An acrostic (from French acrostiche < post-classical Latin acrostichis < Hellenistic Greek: , from ancient Greek:  'highest, topmost' 'verse') is a poem or other form of writing in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out a word or a message^. As a form of constrained writing, an acrostic can be used as a mnemonic device to aid memory retrieval. A famous acrostic was made in Greek for the acclamation JESUS CHRIST, GOD, SON, SAVIOUR, Iesous CHristos, THeou Yios, Soter — ch and th being each one letter in Greek). The initials spell ICHTHYS (ΙΧΘΥΣ), Greek for fish.

 Here's a Acrostic by someone on the internet:

Ice Cream

I love every flavor.
Cookies & Cream.
English Toffee.

Chocolate Chip.
Rocky Road.
Even Strawberry and
Almond Fudge.
Mmmmmmmm

Clara By The 'Girl'

Clever and calm,

Lightly freckled,

And tall for ten,

Radiant, quiet,

And sweet. That's all!

Thank you for reading this post. Please leave comments telling my sister to let me post again.:) That's all!"

Thanks, Girl! That's a nice poem! Yes, please leave comments about WHATEVER YOU WANT! LOL!!!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!

HELLO, 2013