Word After Word

“always trying to raise us higher….. “   “good things are special”

What a challenging summer!

 Both my stepsons off to war; dead American soldiers and captured ones in Afghanistan. I do not know how to listen to the news these days. I know how to pray.

Hard, hard, hard. My best friend moved 800 miles away. Family hardships in Florida. Acres of solitude furrowed by loneliness stretching all the way to the horizon. The best teaching experience—a perfect May term—followed by months of no teaching, an abyss.

I feel as though every day it pours rain, all day long, and it never relents. (We are still talking about our Great Flood in Holland—still!)

I will not complain about summers off. But since I was five years old, with a raft of stuffed bears lined up on a blanket under the oak tree in my front yard in Orlando, the bears taking notes and learning so much, becoming much wiser bears, I’ve been teaching. It’s as much a part of my identity as my hair, my skin, my heart. So summer is always complicated for me. I always feel laid off. It’s so lonely. I feel I should be re-organizing my closets, starting filing systems, or traveling to Majorca. And I have no energy for these things. I want to teach.

So when on Tuesday my former student and dear friend Anna sent me the beautiful book she made with her students in elementary schools in Detroit, when she worked as a poet in the schools, I sat down, read the book straight through, and wept with joy. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. My student, teaching. Teaching brilliantly.

* 

My teacher, novelist and playwright Janet Burroway, signs books this way: she looks the reader in the eye, and lets the book fall open to a page. Focusing on the person who just bought her book, her reader, she lets her finger run down the page until it stops. That’s the phrase she writes in the front of the book, where she signs her name. So sometimes I do that too, and I’d done it for Anna in Chicago. When I looked in the book of kid poems Anna sent me, she’d done the same thing.

 

Oh lineage.

 

We do not get to keep our children. They aren’t ours. We do not get to teach all year long. Summer is for love and learning. The parts of me that want to leave Orlando can’t and the parts that long for home will never return. Our students become teachers. Their students become stars.

 

Anna, thank you for the umbrella, this break from the hard rain that is this summer. Your works changes lives. You are a brilliant writer and gifted teacher. These poems are amazing. This art is the most true thing I’ve seen in weeks and it is healing some hearts!

 Here is one of my favorite poems from the anthology Anna made:

“Sadness Is”

Sadness is

when I just punch

a fool cause

I am a monster

and think I’m cool

–Samuel Washington

I also really really love the collage titled “A Mouse With a Crown.” How lovely it is to live in a crown that keeps you safe.

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2. Quality of Blog Writing Question: What Drives The Voice?
3. NYC Blog One: Always Remember This
4. NYC Blog Two 2 Poetry Readings: James Richardson, Elaine Sexton
5. “Nothing is Wasted” or How To Teach Writing