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"[[nid:7188]]April is National Poetry Month here in the United States. We'd like you to help us celebrate by penning a poem in the comment field below or on our Facebook page. Not the next Walt Whitman? Fear not. The only rule is that you must invoke our favorite muse: the ocean. Whether you praise saltwater waves, ponder Arctic jelly fish, or pretend to be the baleen in a whale's mouth, WE WANT YOUR POEMS.  Please take a few seconds, minutes, or hours and submit your odes to the big blue. We'll post some of our favorites (good and bad) on our blog at the end of the month. Want a bit more structure? Try a Haiku -- a perfect form for Facebook or Twitter. That's 17 syllables, in three lines or less. Typically the syllables are split up 5, 7, and 5.  Need some inspiration? Peruse the multi-media section of the Ocean Portal for photos and video. To kick things off\u2026here is one of our very own (and very bad) poems: On a seaside cliff Magnified whales still a speck Wish I were a fish If you\u2019re in the Washington, D.C. area, celebrate your love for the ocean by joining us at a free ocean haiku writing workshop at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History from 1-3 pm, on Saturday, April 9, 2011. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://ocean.si.edu/blog/your-ode-big-blue>