Cute Little Pots

I have a summer job working for the National Writing Project e-Anthology E-team. People who participate in the NWP summer institutes post their personal writing on the e-Anthology to get feedback from other writers, and in turn comment on each others' writing. At the height of the summer, more institutes are in session, more people are posting, and more pieces get left unnoticed--in theory. That's where the 12-member E-team comes in. We spend the summer trolling the anthology primarily for pieces that have no responses (and then when all those are addressed, the pieces that have only one response) and we give feedback, so that every person who takes the time and guts to put their work out there gets a thoughtful response. I really love this job.

Part of the e-Anthology's launch in May required the E-team members to have prepared pieces to populate the anthology so that summer fellows wouldn't feel like they were showing up to a ghost town. I composed the poem, "Cute Little Pots," for this purpose. Mostly, I was trying to showcase the multimedia features of the e-Anthology by including photographs of something bizarre that Elsie did, but I failed miserably. I'm posting it here as a guinea pig so that I can try it again with pictures on the e-Anthology. I don't usually do poetry because I feel like it's too forced, but prose didn't really work so well with this. I hope you don't hate it, and maybe even get a chuckle out of it. :)

Cute Little Pots

Three little pots
with cute little seeds
to become cute little
basil, parlsey,
and strawberries.

Little plants tended,
watered, and sunned
are little plants that
outgrow little pots.

Cute little girl
(not a day over two)
finds empty little pots
and lines them up
three in a row


and plants her own
to watch them grow


in cute little pots.

Cheers!