The New York Times has a fun contest going for young people: It invites them to "find" poetry in its stories. The students are instructed to take snippets from actual news articles and assemble them into poems of not more than 14 lines. The entrants must not add more than two words of their own to make the poem hold together, and so finding the right phrases can be quite a challenge.

Why should the kids have all the fun? Maybe we should try something like that with this blog. Pick a blog post -- any post -- and make a poem out of the words found therein.

The rules are pretty simple:

- Each poem must be 14 or fewer lines long.
- You may give it your own original title if you like.
- The poem itself should use no more than two of your own words. The rest of the words and phrases should come from some post on this blog, past or present.
- You might choose to write in a traditional poetic form, or not.
- Remember that in a poem, every word, line break and mark of punctuation carries meaning, so have fun experimenting with repetition of words, alliteration, assonance or anything else that enhances what you’d like to say.

We'll try to get the ball rolling here with this one from our Monday post about the water bureau: