A Found Poem

…A found poem is a piece of poetry that wasn’t intended as poetry. In other words, it’s up to the poet to find poetic words and phrases in a prose piece…

Paul Janeczko in A Kick in the Head

I’ve been cutting up books. This was a scrap left over:

So I cut it up into individual words, like those packages of word magnets you can buy at gifty stores, and I looked for a poem in the words.

Here’s what I came up with:

The wolf watches lambs
keeping hungry eye
on them that stray
into holes — o my

Yes, I cheated to get the “oh”. I cut the word “to” in half. The “my” must have been on the reverse of the page. I can’t explain it otherwise.

Here’s what I’m really cutting the books up for — the pictures.

I make cards using the pictures from old, worn-out children’s books. The ones that are headed for the garbage. Or free at yard sales. Where kids have colored on pages or ripped pages or the binding is so badly broken that pages are falling out.

I looked through my collage cards to see if I had one that went with my poem.

I didn’t.

I had this one, though. No wolf, but a couple of predators.

I can’t imagine an occasion for sending a card like this, but I had fun making it.