Poetry Friday--Fun With Similes

Last Friday, Tara Smith, at A Teaching Life, shared an autumn poem, "Toward the Solstice" by Mark Perlberg. The poet wrote:

We raked the leaves into shifting piles on the lawn,
scooped them into deep round baskets
and spilled them in the street against the curb.

When I read these lines I remembered the bushel baskets that were standard in everyone's garage in the 1950s. Some may have known them as peach baskets, but they were used for carrying apples, corn, and all sorts of other things. Where I grew up on Long Island, NY, they were used for clams or crabs. And, of course, for moving raked leaves to the burn pile.

I left a comment on Tara's blog,

"scooped them into deep round baskets" What a forgotten memory the line brought back to me. No black plastic in those days. I can only imagine the poets of today writing about leaves in garbage bags:

scooped them into heavy-duty trash bags
lined them up against the curb
like a wall on the Mexican border
discouraging kids from taking that leap...

Of course, when I wrote the comment last week, the election was still foremost in my mind, but, I also got to thinking about other ways to describe ugly black plastic bags full of leaves and thus embarked on a fun afternoon of similes.

Here are three more:

scooped them into heavy-duty trash bags
lined them up like jelly beans at the curb--
the giant black ones that tasted too strongly
of licorice and no one wanted to eat--


scooped them into trash bags
compacted the leaves thoroughly
then lined them up along the road
like Babci's kiszka in a frying pan


scooped them into heavy-duty trash bags,
knotted their convenient red drawstrings
so they looked like a row of be-ribboned
black cats on a vintage Halloween postcard

The first one is obvious. Does anyone know about the second one? Babci (pronounced Bop-chee) is grandmother in Polish. Kiszka (pronounced keesh-ka) is a Polish blood sausage (something I never would touch, but that my father loved--I shudder to remember the look and smell of it).

Here's a postcard to illustrate the third (but has only one be-ribboned cat):

After four similes, I ran out of ideas. Metaphors didn't seem right at all for plastic trash bags. That's an exercise for another time and another topic. Neither similes nor metaphors appear in my poems, for the most part, I'm a haiku person after all. In haiku a trash bag is a trash bag. Period.

trashbags at the curb
the annual blister
on my palm

© Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.

Jama is the Poetry Friday Round-Up host this week, so I'll meet you at Jama's Alphabet Soup.