Observe. Look around you. Start “seeing” with poet-eyes. If a tree is really old and gnarled, you might imagine the limbs being “creepy bones of an old witch,” or a “braid of crooked bones.”

Think like a poet. It isn’t that hard. The late poet Barbara Juster Esbensen once said that her young son ran inside telling her he saw a bunch of bees swarming. But ... he actually said that he had seen “a celebration of bees.” (This became the title of her well-known and wonderful book about teaching poetry.)

Poetry (metaphor) comes very naturally to the young.

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