SATURDAY STRETCHES

by Janie Reinart

Welcome to Saturday Stretches. We all need to warm up before we sing, exercise or write! We will be sharing ideas here to help you “work out” your writing muscles. Take a deep cleansing breath and stretch! 

For more writing inspiration, share your "stretches" with us. Please post them in the comment section.

#1 Excerpt from Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman

CIRCLE your favorite phrases or words in the excerpt. 

CREATE a free verse poem telling a different or new story using the words or phrases you selected. 

You may add your own words and repeat words or phrases in your free verse poem.

In this season, whenever Antonina crossed the park on her way to the trolley stop, church, or market, she walked through corridors thickly scented with linden flowers and abuzz with half-truths—in local slang, lipa also meant white lies.
Across the river, the skyline of Old Town rose from the earl morning mist like sentences written in invisible ink—first just the roofs, whose curved terra-cotta tiles overlapped like pigeon feathers—then a story of sea green, pink, yellow, red, copper, and beige row houses that lined cobbled stoned streets leading to Market Square. 
In the 1930’s, an open-air market served the Praga district too, near the factory on Zabkowska (Tooth) Street designed to look like a squat castle. But it wasn’t as festive as Old Town’s, where dozens of vendors sold produce, crafts, and food below yellow and tan awnings, the shop windows displayed Baltic amber, and for a few groschen a trained parrot would pick your fortune from a small jug of paper scrolls.

Just beyond Old Town, lay the large Jewish Quarter, full of mazy streets, woman wearing wigs, and men sideburn curls, religious dancing, a mix of dialects and aromas, tiny shops, dyed silks, and flat-roofed buildings where iron balconies painted black or moss green, rose one above the other, like opera boxes filled not with people but with tomato pots and flowers.