April is National Poetry Month, and
Julie Fogliano’s When Green Becomes
Tomatoes: Poems for All Seasons, with pictures by Julie Morstad, is a
book of poems that makes you stop and read each one twice. They are joyful,
childlike, and reflect the agonizing wait for sunshine to appear after a long
winter.
Each poem is marked with a date. For
instance, the poem for April 3 is an accurate depiction of a gray day after
heavy rain.
april 3
today
the sky was too busy sulking to rain
and the sun was exhausted from trying
and everyone
it seemed
had decided
to wear their sadness
on the outside
and even the birds
and all their singing
sounded brokenhearted
inside of all that gray.
When Green Becomes Tomatoes starts
and ends with the same poem on March 20 in the collection of poems categorized
as “Spring.” Spring showers and daffodils gives way to “Summer,” a collection
of poems focused on swimming in cool water, fireflies, and tomatoes on the
vine. “Fall” is filled with leaves falling, pumpkins, and the first hints of
winter. "Winter" arrives in a blanket of white with cozy poems,
only to turn into spring again.
Morstad’s illustrations are so
gorgeous that they would not look out of place framed on a wall. In a style
that is similar to Gyo Fujikawa and Edward Gorey, Morstad’s illustrations are
poetry themselves and bring Fogliano’s poems and the seasons to life.
Enjoy National Poetry Month by
selecting a poem to read from When Green
Becomes Tomatoes, where there is a poem for every season.
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