Monday Poetry Stretch - Animating the Inanimate

I'm rereading Barbara Juster Esbensens's book A Celebration of Bees: Helping Children to Write Poetry and am enjoying the chapter on animating the inanimate. Here's an excerpt.

In the previous two chapters we have seen that words, used with imagination and skill, can bring to three-dimensional life people, animals, birds, and insects of all kinds. We can show the inner feelings of a person simply by describing a walk, or the tilt of a head; we can give ferocity to a lion, flight to a dragonfly, or lanky-legged height to a giraffe.

All this is accomplished by merely choosing the right words. By this time, it must be evident that words are magical and powerful. We can use them to do our bidding. We can be as powerful ourselves as any wizard!

The chapter goes on to explore how to motivate children to look at an inanimate object and see it as something with a life of its own--breathing and alive.

Here's a poem I love that does just that.

School Buses
by Russell Hoban
(found in The Pedaling Man and Other Poems)

You'd think that by the end of June they'd take themselves
Away, get out of sight -- but no, they don't; they
Don't at all. You see them waiting through
July in clumps of sumac near the railroad, or
Behind a service station, watching, always watching for a
Child who's let go of summer's hand and strayed. I have
Seen them hunting on the roads of August -- empty buses
Scanning woods and ponds with rows of empty eyes. This morning
I saw five of them, parked like a week of
Schooldays, smiling slow in orange paint and
Smirking with their mirrors in the sun --
But summer isn't done! Not yet!

So, your challenge is to write a poem in which you animate an inanimate object. Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week.