Similes as Bright as Smiling Summer Sunshine

Poetry Paraders know that similes, like smiles and summer sunshine, brighten our days-- and make our poetry more descriptive!  A simile is a figure of speech that links two things using like or as. Similes make comparisons, often pointing out characteristics that two things have in common.  Today's first poem starts with a simile, imagining if sunlight fell like snowflakes and stretching that comparison into a poem: 

Sunflakes

If sunlight fell like snowflakes,
gleaming yellow and so bright,
we could build a sunman,
we could have a sunball fight,
we could watch the sunflakes
drifting in the sky.
We could go sleighing 
in the middle of July
through sundrifts and sunbanks,
we could ride a sunmobile,
and we could touch sunflakes--
I wonder how they'd feel.

--Frank Asch 
 
Similes are handy tools for Poetry Paraders: recognizing them in our reading helps us understand what's going on, and using them in our writing helps us describe the people, places, things, emotions, and actions in the poems we're creating.  Our next poem, from If Pigs Could Fly... and Other Deep Thoughts by Bruce Lansky, shares a list of well-known similes-- a poem full of comparisons that we've heard many times:

Predictable 

Poor as a church mouse.
strong as an ox,
cute as a button,
smart as a fox.

thin as a toothpick,
white as a ghost,
fit as a fiddle,
dumb as a post.

bald as an eagle,
neat as a pin,
proud as a peacock,
ugly as sin.

When people are talking
you know what they'll say
as soon as they start to
use a cliché. 

A cliché is an expression or phrase which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect.  We've all heard the phrase as quiet as a mouse: it's a simile that's so well-known and so often-used that it's become a little tired and worn-out: as tired and worn out... as last summer's flip-flops?  Maybe, when we're writing about that quiet cliché mouse, we'll use our imaginations and make a fresh simile:  as quiet as... a winter mouse watching snowflakes falling in a moonlit field.

Sometimes, similes make comparisons pointing out what two things don't have in common.  Our next selection, is loaded with fresh comparisons of unalike things... similes that make us smile:

As comfortable as a hairbrush in bed

As graceful as a hippopotamus on roller skates

As clean as a coal miner's fingernails

As convenient as an unabridged dictionary

As reassuring as a dentist's smile

As exciting as a plateful of cabbage

As pleasant as ice water in your shoe

As welcome as a rainy Saturday

As easy as collecting feathers in a hurricane

--from As: A Surfeit of Similes by Norton Juster (the guy who wrote The Phantom Tollbooth)

So let's soak up those smiling summer sunshine similes, Poetry Paraders.  Adding comparisons using like or as to our writing will make our poetry as clever as zippers... as fresh as a peach! 

And by the way, today is National Gumdrop Day.  Let's celebrate by making a simile: yellow gumdrops are like a handful of sunshine!