There is no such thing as a God-forsaken town

Poetry Friday: Flowers

2012-02-03T01:59:00.000-08:00

February seems a good time to think about flowers. Where I live, they grow all the time, but in the north you can now only find them at the florist's. Browning, missing England from India, wrote about delicate, polite buttercups, calling them "Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!" But I kind of have a thing for gaudy, at least when it comes to flowers.

Here's part of Mona Van Duyn's poem "A Bouquet of Zinnias."

A "high prole" flower, says Fussell's book on American
class, the aristocrat wouldn't touch them, says Cooper
on class in England. So unguardedly, unthriftily,
do they open up and show themselves that subtlety,
rarity, nuance, are almost put to shame.

...

In any careless combination they delight.
Pure peach-cheek beside the red of a boiled beet
by the perky scarlet of a cardinal by flamingo pink
by sunsink orange by yellow from a hundred buttercups
by bleached linen white. Any random armful
of the world, one comes to feel, would fit together.

You can read the whole poem here. It has lots more about how great zinnias are, how "tough" and "stubborn" they are, and about the poet's grandmother, who had "big, clumsy-looking hands."

I wrote a poem myself about daffodils and their lack of subtlety. Here it is:

Daffodils

The daffodils take a risk each year
As they burst out in all their gaudy glory.
It would make much more sense
To wait underground a little longer.
After all, it's probably going to snow again.
And even if it doesn't
They aren't going to be around more than a few weeks.

Still, the daffodils don't seem to mind.
They are yellow but fearless.
They don't try to tone themselves down,
To dress in brown or some more practical color,
To camouflage their joy just in case,
To kill time until they are sure the weather will be favorable.
Instead, they are simply beautiful while they can be.

If daffodils think of the future at all
It's a long-term one,
The resurrection of next spring
When the dead bulbs,
Rooted and established in the earth,
Will come to life again
And again, freely,
Careless of their own safety or dignity,
They will give themselves away.

by Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Here's to bright, unsubtle, "high prole" flowers. I love them all. I love how bright and happy they are, the splashes of color they provide. I love the way they can get away with wild combinations that I'd never dare to wear. They inspire me to be who I am, without worrying so much about what people think.

And speaking of flowers, today's Poetry Friday roundup is at The Iris Chronicles.

Photo credit: Matsu

February Already!

2012-02-01T13:30:00.000-08:00

Today's Daily Photo Blog theme (the first of each month is their Theme Day) is Animals. You can see thumbnails of participants' photos here.

Sunday Night

2012-01-29T16:34:00.000-08:00

I'm home from the beach, where I went for a retreat this weekend with the people I work with. We had a wonderful time. The ocean was beautiful and the time away was relaxing.

This morning I sat in our worship service and cried. A lot. If you've been reading my blog for long, you know that this isn't exactly an unusual thing for me to do. We had a time of sharing and I was afraid I was going to stand up and blubber a lot, because that's something else I frequently do.

I didn't stand up and blubber, but here's what I was thinking: God loves me and takes care of me. I know it's so very unsophisticated, and lacking in deep theological insight, and it sounds like I'm a child, but I don't care. It's wonderful to know this. It took me more than forty years to learn it, but I know it now. I know it.

I am more fragile since the earthquake, and less flexible. I think less and feel more. I read less and write more. I don't think all these changes are positive, necessarily; this is just the way I am, for now. But I am so glad I know, with all my heart, that God loves me.

I hesitate to hit Publish Post for this one. There's nothing smart about it, nothing deep; it's something you'd think I wouldn't have had to learn. After all, I was raised to know that God loved me. I prayed when I was four years old to ask Jesus into my heart. People told me all my life that He loved me. I told other people that He loved them. But somehow it was always about my performance. Was I good enough? Were my grades perfect? Was I trying my hardest, all the time?

This weekend our theme was from the first chapter of Joshua, where God says, "Be strong and courageous." The speaker talked about how people responded to the earthquake, how strong and courageous they were. You know what? I wasn't strong and courageous. I'm not writing this so that I'll get comments telling me I was; I know I wasn't. I did the best I could, but I wouldn't describe the results as strong and courageous, at all.

I was more illustrating a different verse, the one about Christ's strength being made perfect in my weakness. I was so very weak, and He was so very strong.

When I was a child I went to the altar all the time, every time a preacher suggested it. One time a dear old lady said to me, as I staggered to my feet after crying at the altar, "Jesus loves you very much." I think in my mind that translated to: "Jesus loves you when you come forward and weep, racked with guilt." I don't know if she meant that or not, but that's what I thought, that Jesus loved me when I repented, constantly, never feeling I had repented enough or that I could rest. Now I know that Jesus loves me when I go forward, and when I sit sulking in my seat, and when I listen and when I don't, and when I'm strong and courageous and when I'm weak and pitiful. Just the way I love my children when they do and are all those things. He loves me because I'm His.

I know, I know; there are a million qualifications I should make about how I still have to obey and how God loving me isn't a license to do whatever I want. I know all that. But I also know that God loves me, plain and simple. He does. He really does.

So that's what I was crying about in the worship service this morning.

Poetry Friday!

2012-01-27T09:01:00.000-08:00

I really don't think I'm going to get a moment to post anything today for Poetry Friday. Just in case I don't, go here and read what everybody else posted.

Poetry Friday: A Mother to her Waking Infant

2012-01-20T13:43:00.000-08:00

I found a poem today that was new to me, but the ideas and feelings in it are not new at all. I love finding evidence that some things don't change much. Joanna Baillie lived from 1762 to 1851, and she wrote these lines about her baby:

A Mother to Her Waking Infant
BY JOANNA BAILLIE

Now in thy dazzling half-oped eye,
Thy curled nose and lip awry,
Uphoisted arms and noddling head,
And little chin with crystal spread,
Poor helpless thing! what do I see,
That I should sing of thee?

From thy poor tongue no accents come,
Which can but rub thy toothless gum:
Small understanding boasts thy face,
Thy shapeless limbs nor step nor grace:
A few short words thy feats may tell,
And yet I love thee well.

You can read the rest of the poem here. I love the way Baillie describes her baby, who can't do much yet, and ignores his mother's poem, and laughs when everyone is sad, and yet is adored.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Katie's Earthquake Memories

2012-01-14T07:05:00.001-08:00

Katie has started sharing the notes she took the night of the earthquake and for a few subsequent days. You can read that here and here. It was painful reading for me. It brought back those days very vividly. And yet it was also fascinating, because Katie included some details about me that I don't remember at all, but that my husband confirms are right. (I knew they were right anyway, since these were notes Katie took at the time.)

It's interesting to me how the story you tell becomes the story that happened. I have told my earthquake story so many times. It's completely accurate; I started writing it down a week later. But there are details I didn't write down or speak, and so they were forgotten. For example, I didn't remember that after the woman died on the soccer field on the morning of the 13th, I went and woke up our school nurse to come and look at her and see if there as anything she could do. She ended up just confirming that the woman was dead. I remember the screaming, and the praying, and I remember another staff member sitting with the bereaved family for hours, and I remember how I cried, and felt that this was the saddest thing I had ever heard of in my life. But in my memory, I was completely passive. It's silly, but I feel a tiny bit better knowing that at least I tried to do something.

I also don't remember Katie being there when we started picking up our books and righting our bookcase. That is somehow comforting, knowing that we immediately started cleaning up. I thought we had waited longer, because I remember thinking that everything was just going to fall down again. And it is also wonderful to know, or be reminded, that we had people around us, going through it all.

One thing that made me cringe a little was Katie's remark "Ruth and the kids going." I thought I had gotten over feeling badly about leaving Haiti, but those feelings came back when I read that, even though Katie didn't comment on how it made her feel. She didn't write, "Ruth, that coward and abandoner of duty," but that's how I saw myself.

It's such a waste of energy to keep brooding over that all these months later. We did what we thought was best at the time, and my husband was able to be useful in ways he wouldn't have if we had been there, and good things came out of our months in the States. I know all those arguments, but still, when I think about leaving on the Saturday after the quake, I feel guilty. When I hear people talking about the time after the quake, as I did on Thursday when a group of us got together to pray and sing, I think, I should have been there.

I remember it so clearly. My husband said to me, "You're going."

I said, "Shouldn't we talk about it some more?"

He said, "No, you're going."

I could tell it was very important to him, because he doesn't usually make decisions like that and tell me how it's going to be. I knew it wasn't a time to dilly-dally and argue. It was a time to pack my bag and do as I was told. And then to spend six months in the US second-guessing the decision.

I am glad Katie shared this. Thank you, Katie, for being there that night and all the days since. There's just something about earthquake friends.

Poetry Friday: Winter

2012-01-13T15:41:00.000-08:00

Two years ago in the wake of the earthquake, I moved suddenly to the United States. I went from tropical weather to a cold, leafless January. I hadn't experienced winter in ten years and the transition wasn't an easy one. But winter is beautiful, too. I never used to miss winter weather, and I still don't want to go live in it, or anything, but I do sometimes think about how beautiful it is.

On Wednesday night my friend Matsu sent me this photo of the moon in the trees. It really looks like "a liquid moon," as the poem says.

Winter Trees

By William Carlos Williams

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Anniversary

2012-01-11T13:34:00.000-08:00

I'll be honest: I've hardly read any of the links in the post I sent you to this morning. I did read the one about how Haiti can be rich again; that seemed cheerful enough that I could risk it. It's not at all like me to hide from the news. Before the earthquake I was a news junkie. In the six months I spent in the States after the quake, I read everything anyone in the world wrote about Haiti and posted on the internet. But now, I protect myself more; I don't read nearly as much news as I used to, whether about Haiti or elsewhere in the world.

I was glad Lexi wrote a post with links in it so that I could share articles with you, my readers, but I can't bring myself to go looking for them or even to read many of them when I see them. Yes, I'm grateful for my life and that my family was spared and for all the many blessings that God gave me in the aftermath of that night in 2010. But mostly all I can do in these days leading up to the anniversary is feel a deep sadness.

Here's what happened that night to us, two years ago tomorrow.

Links About the Two-Year Anniversary

2012-01-11T04:20:00.001-08:00

Lexi has been reading about the anniversary and here's her post.

Back to School

2012-01-10T06:57:00.001-08:00

"Why," sighed an exasperated middle schooler this morning, "do they always have to mess up the schedule every quarter?"

By mess up the student meant change, and I am very much in sympathy with that view. I don't like change. I want everything to stay the same forever and ever. Even when details are far from perfect, I seem to derive security from sameness and predictability. It's hard for me to picture how things could be better.

I live in a country where everything changes constantly, and obviously this causes me some problems from time to time. In a recent professional development exercise, all the teachers were sorted into groups based on personality type. I ended up in a group of others like me, people who wanted to be in control. How did we manage in Haiti, we asked each other? We figured out that we find one small area we can control: our classrooms. While we work on being flexible, we feel that in our classrooms, our kingdoms, nothing must ever go wrong. Our word must be law. Structure must reign supreme.

And...I teach middle schoolers. Again, not a real recipe for stability.

The fact is, as I'm learning more and more the older I get, I am not in control. Of anything. Any idea that I am is purely an illusion, and that illusion can be shattered in seconds, by riots, or the issues of a middle schooler, or, perhaps an earthquake.

We started back to school today, and I am back in my classroom, my kingdom. Already this morning I've dealt with two schedule changes, talked to kids who lost a much loved brother and cousin over the break, and confronted a room full of eighth graders who were happy to see each other again and not so much interested in me taking attendance. And it's only 10 AM.

Here's something C. S. Lewis wrote that I need to read often:

“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life — the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time.”

Indeed. This semester, I'll try again to remember it. I'm not in control; God is. Sometimes my schedule will be messed up by someone's need, or someone's joy, or Haiti's unpredictability. And that's OK. That is my schedule for that day.

Poetry Friday: Heartbreak and Such

2012-01-06T05:39:00.000-08:00

My daughter is currently obsessed with Les Misérables, the book and the musical. The first time she watched the musical, she described it as "like someone took my heart out and stomped on it."

Why do we seek that feeling in literature? Why don't we just read happy stories to escape from the sadness in our real lives? I don't know, but there's something about January that makes me want to read sad poems. Christmas is over, it's cold (OK, where I live, cold is seventy degrees, but work with me here), it's time to go back to work, weeks stretching out ahead with nothing much to look forward to. Plus there's next Thursday looming large, the two-year anniversary of the Haitian earthquake. In that mood, nothing's better than Japanese poetry. It's all that all that heartache, all that longing, all that awareness of transience, all that Sehnsucht. Perhaps some of that sensibility comes from living with earthquakes.

I can't read Japanese poetry in the original, but I have two books of it, One Hundred Poems from the Japanese and One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese. The translations are done by Kenneth Rexroth, who explains in his introduction to the first book,

Japanese poetry does what poetry does everywhere: it intensifies and exalts experience. ... Many...editors and translators have been embarrassed by this intensity and concentration and have labored to explain each poem until it has been explained away. Often the explanation has obtruded into the poem itself, which has been expanded with concealed commentary and interpretation.

So I'm not going to include any commentary, but here are a couple of heartbreaking and beautiful Japanese poems for this cold (OK, just not boiling hot) January day.

A strange old man
Stops me,
Looking out of my deep mirror.

Hitomaro

May those who are born after me
Never travel such roads of love.

Hitomaro

I go out of the darkness
Onto a road of darkness
Lit only by the far off
Moon on the edge of the mountains.

Izumi

The cricket cries
In the frost.
On my narrow bed,
In a folded quilt,
I sleep alone.

The Regent Fujiwara No Go-Kyogoku

The plovers cry
Over the evening waves
Of Lake Omi.
In my withering heart
I remember the past.

Kakinomoto No Hitomaro

In the dusk the path
You used to come to me
Is overgrown and indistinguishable,
Except for the spider webs
That hang across it
Like threads of sorrow.

Izumi Shikibu

This world of ours,
To what shall I compare it?
To the white wake of a boat
That rows away in the early dawn.

Shami Mansei

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

One Little Word for 2012

2012-01-02T13:48:00.000-08:00

For the past few years, since 2009, I have chosen One Little Word for each year. In 2009 the word was "LOOK." In 2010 the word was "LOVED." And last year's word was "TRUST."

This year, my One Little Word is "HEAL." A friend told me after the earthquake that it takes three years to get over a major trauma like that. The first year is the year of grieving. The second is the year of remembrance. And the third is the year of healing. So far, this has been accurate. In 2010 I reeled. In 2011 I was in "a year ago today" mode. And this year, I'm ready to heal.

The thing is, you never get to heal completely before other wounds come along. I remember having constantly skinned knees as a child; no sooner would I get some fresh skin back and lose the scab than I'd fall again. I'm still just as clumsy, too; last week I fell while walking down stairs and taking pictures at the same time. Yeah, I guess I'm not as good at multitasking as I like to think. My knees are a mess and I broke my camera.

But I digress. My point was that healing has to be an ongoing process; we're constantly being bombarded with new injury.

"Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."

We lost a recent alumnus to a car accident on New Year's Eve and I hurt so much for his family, especially his mother, whose pain I can't even bring myself to imagine. She is healing from the earthquake still, just like I am, and she has other griefs in her life too, and now this. It's not like we can heal completely and then bask in glorious wholeness for the rest of our lives. It's all a process.

God is in the business of healing, though. He restores us, brings good out of what is nasty and awful and impossible in our lives, helps us slog through the nightmares and come out on the other side better. This year I want to celebrate the healing that God has already done in my life and in Haiti. And I want to watch for the signs of the ongoing process.

On New Year's Eve I sat at a party and listened to someone's earthquake story, one of the most amazing I've heard yet. I hope the teller will write a book. Here's something she said that resonated with me: the earthquake recalibrated us. We won't ever be entirely the same as we were before. Some of us have fears we didn't have before. Certain sounds and experiences are still not easy. Those are different for everyone, and I'm learning that I don't have to feel foolish, for example, for being freaked out by the rumble of an especially loud passing truck (that's exactly how the earthquake sounded when it began), even if nobody else is affected by it.

Hardest to accept is that some relationships were broken by the aftermath of the earthquake, and they will never be exactly the same again, even if healing happens. There are beautiful new relationships that have grown up, but I still grieve the lost ones, because people aren't interchangeable.

This year, I hope more of my wounds will turn into scars. Scars are there forever. As Dumbledore pointed out, they can even be useful, though I don't have one that's the shape of a map of the London underground, like he did. But over time the scars can be "less like scars and more like character."

One Little Word for 2012: HEAL. I can't do it myself, but God can do it.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T04:47:00.000-08:00

The first day of every month is Theme Day at the City Daily Photo blogs. On the first of January, the DP bloggers post their best photo from the year before. Here's a link to thumbnails.

Books I Read This Year

2011-12-31T10:20:00.000-08:00

I only read 40 books this year. That's not even one a week. I hope to make it to at least 52 next year. The links in the list below are to my reviews. (I messed up the numbering in my posts; I think the list below is accurate.)

1. Crazy Love, by Francis Chan
2. Night Over Water, by Ken Follett
3. The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway
4. Fire, by Kristin Cashore
5. Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way, by Shauna Niequist
6. The Dreamer, by Pam Muñoz Ryan
7. Confusion, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
8. Casting Off, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
9. Someone Like You, by Sarah Dessen
10. Walking, by Henry David Thoreau
11. Fire From Heaven, by Mary Renault
12. The Persian Boy, by Mary Renault
13. Funeral Games, by Mary Renault
14. My daughter's 2010 NaNoWriMo novel
15. The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding
16. Scat, by Carl Hiaasen
17. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, by Helen Simonson
18. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
19. Flies on the Butter, by Denise Hildreth
20. Birds Without Wings, by Louis de Bernières
21. Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer
22. The Red Queen, by Philippa Gregory
23. The Last Time They Met, by Anita Shreve
24. Time for Meaning: Crafting Literate Lives in Middle and High School, by Randy Bomer
25. Okay for Now, by Gary Schmidt
26. Shooting Kabul, by N.H. Senzai
27. Red Kayak, by Priscilla Cummings
28. Truth and Consequences, by Alison Lurie
29. Leo and the Lesser Lion, by Sandra Forrester
30. Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, by Lizzie Skurnick
31. The Glorious Ones, by Francine Prose
32. Private Practices, by Stephen White
33. A Theory of Relativity, by Jacquelyn Mitchard
34. The True History of Paradise, by Margaret Cezair-Thompson
35. Mothers and Other Liars, by Amy Bourret
36. Surviving the Applewhites, by Stephanie S. Tolan
37. The Nine Rights of Every Writer, by Vicki Spandel
38. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, by Edwidge Danticat
39. Love, by Marie Vieux-Chauvet
40. Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, by Rob Bell

As always, it was fun for me to go through this list and remember what was going on at the time when I read each of these books, as well as how each of the books affected me. But really, this was a bit of a lackluster reading year. Here's to more literary delight in 2012!

Reading Update

2011-12-31T09:05:00.000-08:00

I'm getting ready to compile my list of everything I read this year, but there are several on my list that I've never blogged about.

Book #40 was The Nine Rights of Every Writer, by Vicki Spandel. I had read this one before and I think it is a wonderfully encouraging book for anyone who is using the Writer's Workshop method of teaching writing. Spandel reminds me why I do what I do.

"Our goal as teachers should not be to fill the world with perfect text, or even acceptable text. Our goal should be to take students to such a place of comfort with writing that they will persist through three pages of random thought to an emerging clarity on page four because they have not one shred of doubt they will get there. After all, only nonwriters fear failure. Writers know clutter and roadblocks and random thinking are all part of the process."

This is the kind of book I want to read every year, as long as I'm teaching.

Book #41 was Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. This is a series of essays about reading and writing as a Haitian. This is another book that needs to be read many times. Here's a piece that stuck with me particularly. Danticat is talking about where she gets material - like any artist, from her life. In this passage she's having a conversation with her aunt about a family scandal.

"'People talk,' Tante Zi went on. 'They say that everything they say to you ends up written down somewhere.'

Because she was my elder, my beloved aunt, I bowed my head in shame, wishing I could apologize for that, but the immigrant artist, like all other artists, is a leech and I needed to latch on. I wanted to quote the French poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé and tell her that everything in the world exists to end up in a book. I wanted to ask her forgiveness for the essay that in my mind I was already writing. The most I could do, however, was to promise her not to use her real name or Marius's."

One of the things Danticat does in Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work is to write about Haitian literature and how it has affected her. One of her recommendations is the three books contained in one volume called Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy, by Marie Vieux-Chauvet. Book #42 was the first of the trilogy, Love. I found it way too intense, and while I intend to go back and read the other two books, I need a break first. This scene from the first few pages of the book gives an idea of the kind of fevered atmosphere that pervades it:

"Jean Luze held my chin and looked into my eyes. I'm afraid he'll hear the disordered beating of my heart. He is tall and I barely reach his shoulder. I would like him to lean and take me in his arms to carry me very far away. Such is the incurable romantic that slumbers in all old maids!

We offer some cake to Augustine, the maid. The house is festive.

'Put on a record, Jean,' Annette proposes. 'The screaming just ruins everything.'

The screams waft from the jail. Horrible, unsexed droning.

'Calédu is having a bit of fun,' M. Long exclaims with a jowl-shaking chortle. (His accent adds a childish note to his cruel remark.)

'A peculiar way to have fun, don't you think?' Jean Luze asks him with a strange, almost hostile, smile.

'Oh, you know, I say to each his own. And anyway, you would have to be insane to try to change anything around here.'"

I will blog more about this trilogy after I finish reading the second and third books.

Book #43 was Rob Bell's controversial Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. I really like Bell's preaching but liked the book less. The warm, discursive way he speaks doesn't work as well in print, especially when he's trying to build an argument. I read this book with a friend, whom I shall call Reading Buddy (hereinafter, RB). We wanted to see if we agreed with what we were reading, that Bell was a heretic, in relation to traditional, orthodox (small o) Christianity. RB did use the H word more than once as we read. It turns out that I have a higher tolerance for heresy than RB does. I read lots of this aloud and there was much lively discussion, which is probably the way the book is best experienced. I found a great deal to love in the book, and RB, less so. I loved the poetic way Bell approaches scripture; RB didn't love the enormous leaps of logic and snorted frequently as I read certain passages. I read on my Kindle, but RB's paper copy was full of highlighting, large flocks of exclamation marks and question marks. Conclusion: I am not willing to call Bell a heretic. He's asking questions which many Christians have asked through the ages. RB is also not willing to call him a heretic, but feels that some of his statements border on heresy. And both of us liked the last chapter. Here's how it ends:

"Love is why I've written this book, and love is what I want to leave you with.

May you experience this vast, expansive, infinite, indestructible love that has been yours all along. May you discover that this love is as wide as the sky and as small as the cracks in your heart no one else knows about. And may you know, deep in your bones, that love wins."

Amen. Love really does win. Rob and I, and RB and I, might not agree on all the details, but love wins. Praise God for that.

Poetry Friday: Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks

2011-12-30T16:23:00.000-08:00

I am joining Poetry Friday late today because we have been driving home from the beach (where, by the way, we had such a great time). In honor of the beach, and also because my daughter gave me a book of Pablo Neruda poetry for Christmas (I read some of these poems aloud while we were at the beach and we joked about how many of them contained the word "naked"), I offer this mermaid poem, followed by a video with Ethan Hawke reading the poem. The text and video have two different translations. I believe the one on the video is the same as what I have in my book, by Alastair Reid. I don't know who did the other translation.

Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks
by Pablo Neruda

All those men were there inside,
when she came in totally naked.
They had been drinking: they began to spit.
Newly come from the river, she knew nothing.
She was a mermaid who had lost her way.
The insults flowed down her gleaming flesh.
Obscenities drowned her golden breasts.
Not knowing tears, she did not weep tears.
Not knowing clothes, she did not have clothes.
They blackened her with burnt corks and cigarette stubs,
and rolled around laughing on the tavern floor.
She did not speak because she had no speech.
Her eyes were the colour of distant love,
her twin arms were made of white topaz.
Her lips moved, silent, in a coral light,
and suddenly she went out by that door.
Entering the river she was cleaned,
shining like a white stone in the rain,
and without looking back she swam again
swam towards emptiness, swam towards death.

Pablo Neruda

Mermaids in Haiti have vodou connections, but the one in this poem is simply a beautiful, ethereal being who is not understood by the boorish people around her. Like many of the poems in my new book, Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, this one is mysterious but lovely.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Messiah (Christmas Portions)

2011-12-23T12:52:00.001-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I went to a performance of parts of the Messiah. The music was so beautiful and reminded me of how artists can show us realities of which we aren't normally aware. I loved the way this poem expressed that idea, and also how the music can transform the performers into something more than they were. Follow the link at the end of my excerpt to see how that happens.

Messiah (Christmas Portions)
By Mark Doty

A little heat caught
in gleaming rags,
in shrouds of veil,
torn and sun-shot swaddlings:

over the Methodist roof,
two clouds propose a Zion
of their own, blazing
(colors of tarnish on copper)

against the steely close
of a coastal afternoon, December,
while under the steeple
the Choral Society

prepares to perform
Messiah, pouring, in their best
blacks and whites, onto the raked stage.
Not steep, really,

but from here,
the first pew, they’re a looming
cloudbank of familiar angels:
that neighbor who

fights operatically
with her girlfriend, for one,
and the friendly bearded clerk
from the post office

—tenor trapped
in the body of a baritone? Altos
from the A&P, soprano
from the T-shirt shop:

today they’re all poise,
costume and purpose
conveying the right note
of distance and formality.

Here's the rest of the poem. And here's today's roundup.

Read This

2011-12-21T04:21:00.000-08:00

I just read this beautiful post about the incarnation. An excerpt:

"The divinity of God is on display at Christmas in beautiful creche scenes. We sing songs of babies who don’t cry. We mistake quiet for peace. A properly antiseptic and church-y view of birth, arranged as high art to convey the seriousness and sacredness of the incarnation. It is as though the truth of birth is too secular for Emmanuel, it doesn’t look too holy in its real state. So the first days of the God-with-us requires the dignity afforded by our editing.

But this? This creating out of passion and love, the carrying, the seemingly-never-ending-waiting, the knitting-together-of-wonder-in-secret-places, the pain, the labour, the blurred line between joy and “someone please make it stop,” the “I can’t do it” even while you’re in the doing of it, the delivery of new life in blood and hope and humanity?"

Best YA Books of 2011

2011-12-20T16:11:00.000-08:00

I always enjoy reading the best-of lists that come out at the end of the year. Here's one from NPR, the best YA books of the year. I haven't read any of them, and only one has shown up in my classroom during self-selected reading time. I'll have to look into these...

Christmas is Coming...

2011-12-20T14:33:00.000-08:00

Here's what Shauna says here:

"The irony, of course, must not be lost on us: a season that is, at its heart, a love story, a story about faith and fragility, angels, a baby, a star--that sweet, simply beautiful story gets lost so easily in a jarring, toxic tangle of sugar and shopping bags and rushing and parking lots and expectations."

This is really not something I have trouble with; this is why I love Christmas in Haiti. There's no pressure. It's a time to relax, to hang out with friends and family, to go to the beach. And tomorrow is the first day of vacation!

This is Absolutely None of my Business...But Here's What I Think

2011-12-18T11:01:00.000-08:00

No, it's not my business that Michelle Duggar had a miscarriage. But I always feel a pang of sadness when I hear about a woman miscarrying, however early or late in pregnancy. I lost a baby to miscarriage very early in my second pregnancy, and was shaken by it in a way that surprised me with its intensity.

You could say that the Duggars have made their business our business by conducting their lives on television. I have never watched their show, spent any time on their website, or paid much attention to them. I have a friend who watches the show and she informs me that Michelle is a very patient and calm mother who never yells at her kids, even though she has nineteen of them. I have two kids and I highly doubt anyone would describe me that way, so I have to respect Michelle's character for that reason alone. All of this to say that I don't have any opinion on the Duggars or their lifestyle.

I read this blog post first, in which Rachel Stone writes:

The Duggars will always have their critics. But they are people—not a circus, not a freak show, not an ideology. So while I may work out my understanding of Christianity very differently from them, I refuse to believe that there’s nothing I can learn from them; that their concerns and griefs and joys—their stories—are so very different from mine.

I very much agree with this.

Next I read about the Duggars having a funeral for their baby and distributing photos that they had taken. A headline suggested that there was some criticism of them, and Google helped me find a nasty article, which perhaps is only what one could expect from a website called Gawker. (I was going to include the link, but decided not to, because it's unnecessarily rude and uses abusive language. If you want to read it, Google can help you find it, too.) It says that it is not normal to take pictures of a miscarried child (it uses the word "fetus," of course), and recommends retroactively that the Duggars should have stopped having children a long time ago. You can't miss the difference between the horrible tone of the Gawker article and the tender love expressed here, in a letter Michelle wrote to her baby and read aloud on her website.

But the real impetus for this post was reading Katie Allison Granju's take on the story here. Katie herself lost a child recently; her eighteen year old son died of complications from a drug-related assault. Katie has been criticized too, like Michelle, for dealing with her grief in her own way. Her post talks about the way Victorians grieved and about how our culture doesn't have rituals for grieving a lost child. The whole post is very much worth reading. Here's one little snippet:

The fact that those photos of Jubilee Duggar’s little foot and hand might make other people uncomfortable – people who didn’t just have their child die – isn’t the point. Memorial rituals and grief traditions are about helping the parents whose child has just died feel comforted and supported. They’re not about pleasing the rest of us, or about conforming to how we would do it, or about conforming to funerary rites that we would prefer. In fact, expressing our own preferences or tastes in criticizing the way another parent chooses to memorialize her recently dead child strikes me as being in far worse taste than anything the bereaved parent might have done.

I wrote in the first paragraph about how I lost a baby to miscarriage very early in pregnancy. I chose to tell people about it. Many women and even some men shared with me about their own experiences. My brother-in-law wrote me an email saying that he imagined their miscarried children playing in heaven with mine. (Michelle expresses a similar idea in her letter, linked above.) Do you find that creepy? It comforted me. I felt supported by people who had been through miscarriage and come out on the other side. I also chose to name my baby, though I haven't shared the name with very many people. I didn't know the sex of the baby but I thought of her as a girl. I had seen her beating heart on an ultrasound and she was very real to me, a child who was already part of our family. I grieved for my baby for a long time. A few weeks after her due date I started to come out of the fog but thinking about that experience still makes me sad.

Of course, not every woman grieves as intensely as I did for an early miscarriage. That's fine, too. Everyone is different. After the earthquake, I felt a lot of impatience with myself and even shame for the way I grieved, and I have come to accept that it's not wrong or weak to feel what you feel (can you tell I went to counseling?). Grief is not predictable, and it's very personal.

I'm very sorry for Michelle Duggar's loss. I find it completely normal to want to take a picture of her baby. I don't think the pictures are in bad taste. (Tweeting them probably was, but that's another issue. Katie's post says that after a teenaged relative Tweeted the pictures, the Duggars chose to post them on their own site. Apparently they were intended just for the family and for those at the funeral.) And I think both Rachel Stone and Katie Granju are right, that we all just need to be a whole lot kinder. Surely everyone can agree with that.

Planning for Next Year

2011-12-16T12:30:00.001-08:00

I'm writing lesson plans for next year, and feeling unexpectedly weepy, and then realizing that it shouldn't be unexpected. Here's what I wrote this time last year as I struggled to plan for January, one year after the earthquake. I'm looking at last year's plans, and I see how I followed my friend's advice; instead of writing the dates, I wrote "Week 1" and "Week 2." This year is much easier than last, but perhaps those first weeks of January will continue for a long time to have special, terrifying significance for me, and for all of us here in Haiti.

Poetry Friday: Madeleine L'Engle

2011-12-16T04:28:00.000-08:00

Christmas is coming. I'm not ready, but as Madeleine L'Engle reminds us, neither was the world.

First Coming

He did not wait till the world was ready,
till men and nations were at peace
He came when the Heavens were unsteady
and prisoners cried out for release.

He did not wait for the perfect time.
He came when the need was deep and great.
He died with sinners in all their grime,
turned water into wine. He did not wait

till hearts were pure. In joy he came
to a tarnished world of sin and doubt.
To a world like ours, of anguished shame
He came, and his Light would not go out.

He came to a world which did not mesh,
to heal its tangles, shield its scorn.
In the mystery of the Word made Flesh
the Maker of the stars was born.

We cannot wait till the world is sane
to raise our songs with joyful voice,
for to share our grief, to touch our pain,
He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!

Here's today's roundup.

Poetry Friday: Keats and Me

2011-12-09T03:15:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's Poem of the Day from the Academy of American Poets was Keats' "In Drear Nighted December." (You can subscribe to the Poem of the Day email here.) Thankfully I don't live in a cold climate. I have been cold enough with our temperatures dipping down into the lower seventies the last few nights. Brr. But what interested me most about this poem was the last stanza.

In drear nighted December
by John Keats

In drear nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity—
The north cannot undo them
With a sleety whistle through them
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.

In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne'er remember
Apollo's summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.

Ah! would 'twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy—
But were there ever any
Writh'd not of passed joy?
The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal it
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.

I liked Keats' suggestion that this feeling - the idea of forgetting and simply not missing times of happiness in the past, the way nature seems to do - is one that hasn't ever been expressed in poetry. He says that's because human beings are always missing the past. "The feel of not to feel it." What a great line. That made me think about other feelings that poetry may not chronicle.

I have often had experiences that felt as though they were unique to me, something that nobody could ever express in writing. One of the delights of reading, whether prose or poetry, is finding kindred spirits who have expressed those thoughts and feelings I thought were mine alone.

Not much has been expressed by me in writing lately, since I'm knee-deep in grading. Yesterday, though, I wrote this poem:

Sometimes

Sometimes you're trying to sleep
And there's a poem buzzing around the room,
Whining in your ear,
"Get up and write me,
You know I won't be here any more if you wait until morning."

And sometimes you're trying to read your students' papers
And there's a poem jumping up and down
Shouting, "Write me now,
Put that down and pay attention!"

And sometimes you're trying to wash dishes
And a poem bubbles up from the water,
Splashes your face,
Giggles.

And sometimes, you sit down to write a poem,
And those poems that have been bugging you
All night and all day,
Whining, shouting, giggling,
Are quiet.

They have nothing to say now
That you have turned your attention to them.
But - quick! Look out the corner of your eye
And sometimes you can see one
Playing hide and seek.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

I'm looking forward to the Christmas vacation for many reasons, and one of those reasons is that I'll have the chance to do some writing. Meanwhile, I soldier on, grading and grading and grading.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Heart to Heart

2011-12-02T05:10:00.000-08:00

I love how Rita Dove plays with cliches in this poem, and how the heart is in some ways altogether tougher than we thought, and in others just as vulnerable as we supposed.

Heart to Heart
By Rita Dove

It's neither red
nor sweet.
It doesn't melt
or turn over,
break or harden,
so it can't feel
pain,
yearning,
regret.

It doesn't have
a tip to spin on,
it isn't even
shapely—
just a thick clutch
of muscle,
lopsided,
mute.

Here's the rest.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

December, with Lots of Links

2011-12-01T08:36:00.000-08:00

I have all kinds of windows open on my computer, things I've read and thought I should blog about, so today I'm going to link you to a bunch of random stuff I think is interesting. Hope you enjoy at least something here.

First of all, it is, of course, the first day of December, which means it's Theme Day for the City Daily Photo blogs. Today's theme is Action Photos, and you can see thumbnails of the participants' photos here.

NPR had this fascinating post about sounds that no longer exist, sounds that were part of my childhood and that of my contemporaries. Listen to the YouTube soundtrack of the 20th century, and then there's one for the 21st century, too.

Turns out that Derek Webb is one of the founders of NoiseTrade. I didn't know that. Here, he explains in a blog post how giving away free music makes sense for musicians. So interesting. I didn't know that either.

Speaking of music, my daughter found some on the web that a fan has written to go with the Hunger Games books. Here's Rue's Lullaby, from the first book; the lyrics are part of the story, and Zoe Johnson has set them to music. They Don't Own Me (Berries) is an original song inspired by the book. And The Hanging Tree is from the last book in the series, Mockingjay.

Doesn't this look yummy? I sent the link to my husband with the subject heading, "Mmmmmmm" and he took the hint (he's the cook in the family). He wrote back promising to make these. Can't wait!

I'm always interested to read pieces about middle school. In this post, Jon confesses that reading Facebook sometimes makes him feel envious of others whose lives appear to be way more fun than his. This, he claims, makes him "like a seventh grade girl." In a weird sort of way (and not at all what Jon intended), this is encouraging to me. I'm seeing my kids at what for many of them is one of the times of their lives when they are least appealing; ask anyone what he or she was like at thirteen if you don't believe me. Life is tough for them right now. And yet they are pretty cool anyway.

And last, here's a Prayer for the Christmas Season. An excerpt:

"But, Lord God, I want to stay for a while in Christmas where hope is something I can cradle to my chest. I want to dwell here where music sings the promise of love, reminding me of those Mary moments in my life when it seems truth and love are about to burst forth from within and change the world.

Let me hearken to Mary’s song and hear it as a radical claim awakening me for the sake of revolution, to grab hold of the Kingdom of God already present amongst us.

Let me look into the face of the clearest revelation of your love and let him transform me so that when the 'Slaughter of the Innocents' comes again upon this world I will stand up and say, 'NO MORE.'

Let me dwell here in the incarnation of your love and let it change me so that materialism and consumerism are a distant clamor that has no claim on me."

Amen.

November Ends

2011-11-30T03:20:00.000-08:00

Well, I very nearly succeeded with my NaBloPoMo ambitions - to post every day in November. I only missed one day. Meanwhile, my children fared well with NaNoWriMo; both of them met their word count goals, which were 50,000 words for the ninth grader and 10,000 for the third grader. Since I gave birth to these brilliant authors, I think I am perfectly justified in basking in reflected glory.

Figures

2011-11-29T15:42:00.000-08:00

I should totally know better than to blog about being thankful for adversity. I should realize that such a post would make it inevitable that I would sprain my ankle today. Which I did.

Thankful for Adversity

2011-11-29T03:02:00.000-08:00

I found this story, "Finding Purpose After Living with Delusion," inspiring. Milton Greek has schizophrenia, and with the help of people who love him and are straight with him, he's still able to live a good life.

"He is one of a small number of successful people with a severe psychiatric diagnosis who have chosen to tell their story publicly. In doing so, they are contributing to a deeper understanding of mental illness — and setting an example that can help others recover....'Schizophrenia is the best thing that ever happened to me,' he said. 'I know a lot of people with the diagnosis don’t feel that way, but the experience changed me, for the better. I was so arrogant, so narcissistic, so self-involved, and it humbled me. It gave me a purpose, and that purpose has been very much a part of my recovery.'"

A student recently expressed that she felt thankful for the earthquake because of the new friends she had made as a result. Her classmates reacted harshly and she felt ashamed of what she had written. Maybe she could have phrased it differently - she was grateful for what came out of the earthquake, not the earthquake itself - but I could understand what she meant. Sometimes the most difficult things in our lives can turn into gifts.

Crying

2011-11-28T03:17:00.000-08:00

NPR did this interesting piece, complete with YouTube videos, on what happens when political candidates cry, from Muskie in 1972, when a candidate choking up was enough to make people think he should drop out of the race, to 2011, when everyone tears up and people have no problem with it. All of their examples are men except for Hillary Clinton, who is quoted as saying,

"If you get too emotional, that undercuts you. A man can cry — but a woman, that's a different kind of dynamic."

I'm an emotional person myself (I know, I know, that surprises you), and I grew up in a family with men who weren't afraid to cry. (Although sometimes this condition was referred to as "sweaty eyes.") To me, tearing up doesn't show weakness, but compassion. (Blubbering, now, is a different story, and that's what generally happens to me, not just a few dignified tears.) I have often thought that it must be difficult to be male in US society, when there is so much confusion about how much emotion is OK. But Hillary Clinton's comment makes a strange kind of sense, too; if you're competing in a man's world, anything that can be construed as weakness is a risk. And I have a policy of trying not to cry in front of my students (though I may tear up from time to time, I'm not telling). There are way more of them than there are of me, and I do feel weakened by my tears, even though I don't perceive others as weak for crying.

I learned in the earthquake that there are people you want on your side when the world is falling apart because they know just what to do. Until you've been tested in a major catastrophe, you just don't know if you are that kind of person. What I want in a leader is someone who can remain completely calm in a crisis. Maybe he or she will cry later, remembering what happened, but at that moment there is an ability to compartmentalize, to do what needs to be done, and to save the falling apart for another time. But disaster is not the kind of thing you can practice for. People tearing up over their cancer or an experience with a child are not necessarily showing that they don't have that kind of sang-froid. Maybe they had it when they needed it. And anyway, a personal, relational experience will hit differently from a national emergency where many people's lives are at stake.

So, I don't mind political candidates expressing emotion. I join right in; when other people cry, so do I. But if you want to be president, I hope you can set emotion aside when you have to.

Do Not Be Afraid

2011-11-27T03:00:00.000-08:00

It's now socially acceptable to listen to Christmas music, since it's after Thanksgiving. But I have to confess that this year I started listening to it in September. Usually I try to wait at least until November, even if I don't make it all the way to Thanksgiving. But this year I just couldn't wait.

This Christmas song is one I listen to all year round. It was one I thought about and listened to a lot after the earthquake. It reminds me that there was a lot to fear at the first Christmas, just as there is now, and that we don't have to be afraid. Here are the lyrics (copied and pasted from Carolyn Arends' website):

Do Not Be Afraid
by Carolyn Arends

Half a woman, half a child
Mary lay there sleeping
Never dreaming in a little while
She would hear the angel's greeting
Opened her eyes to see
That Gabriel had come
Opened her heart to hear
"You are the chosen one
And do not be afraid
Do not be afraid
Love has found its way to you
So do not be afraid"

Shepherds watching their flocks by night
Guarding against danger
When suddenly there was a blinding light
And then things got even stranger
Angels in the sky
Far as the eye could see
Singing "Christ is born
Oh -- and one more thing...
Do not be afraid
Do not be afraid
Love has found its way to you
So do not be afraid"

Half believing, half afraid
We celebrate the story
But our lives seem about a world away
From angels and their glory
Open our eyes to see
What Mary saw somehow
Open our hearts to hear
Those angels even now
They're singing "Do not be afraid
Do not be afraid
Love has found its way to you
So do not be afraid"

(c) 2001 New Springs Publishing Inc./(ASCAP)/a division of Brentwood Benson Music Publishing, Inc.

This video doesn't show Carolyn singing, but at least you can hear how the song sounds.

Photos and Gratitude

2011-11-26T11:22:00.001-08:00

There's just nothing like a long weekend, and a festive one like Thanksgiving weekend is better still. This morning I took advantage of some extra time to upload a bunch of photos off my camera, and I thought I'd share some of them. They aren't all from this weekend but they all show reasons I have to be grateful.

I'm so grateful for leisure time. This is something many (most?) women in this world get very little of, being constantly busy carrying water or chasing children or working long hours in a factory. I generally have a stack of grading to do, but my life is so easy compared with the way others live. How blessed I am to sprawl out in my hammock with a book and a cup of tea.

Last Friday was a holiday for us, and I woke up at the time I usually do, but later I went back to sleep, and woke again at 9:30 to a quiet house and a note from my husband saying he'd taken the kids to the grocery store. I guess quiet time by myself must be my love language, because that gesture made me feel deeply loved and cherished. I read for a while and then went downstairs and foraged for some breakfast (also left for me by my husband). Here's a picture of my croissants with butter and jelly:

Later he and the kids returned like conquering heroes, with groceries and also this broom, the longest and most amazing broom I ever saw. It came from a street merchant, and it's perfect for the cobwebs in our stairwell. It's so long that I couldn't take a picture of the whole thing at once.

I'm grateful for my family, and for a house to get cobwebs in. And I'm grateful for eyes to see my blessings and a heart to love.

Poetry Friday: Ode to Broken Things

2011-11-25T03:01:00.000-08:00

I always do odes with my eighth graders during Thanksgiving week. I think odes go wonderfully with Thanksgiving, when we are so aware of the huge list of our blessings. We read some examples from Neruda and from students, and I encourage them to write their own. Some people always do. I told you about this last year.

This year as we were reading some Neruda, I noticed this one, "Ode to Broken Things." I've been feeling a bit like a broken thing myself lately. I'm all repaired and glued together, but I'm aware of the fixed places, and I don't think I'm the same as I was before.

This translation is done by George Schade, and is from the book Fifty Odes. Here's Jodey Bateman's translation. I don't read Spanish, so I can't comment on which is more accurate. I like both of them.

This Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for all the broken things in my life and for the way God makes them into something new, something not the same as before, but still beautiful.

Ode to Broken Things

Pablo Neruda, tr. George Schade

Things are being broken
in the house
as if pushed by an invisible
voluntary breaker:
it's not my hands
or yours
or the girls
with tough nails
and earthshaking footsteps:
it was nothing, nobody,
it wasn't the wind,
or the tawny noon,
or the terrestrial night,
it wasn't nose or elbow,
the swelling hip,
ankle
or gust of air:
the plate broke, the lamp fell,
all the flower vases crumbled
one after another, one
in full October
brimming over with scarlet,
worn out by all the violets,
and another empty one
rolled, rolled, rolled
through the winter
until it became
just flower vase gruel,
a broken memory, luminous dust.

And that clock
whose sound
was
the voice of our lives,
the secret
thread
of our weeks,
which one by one
tied up so many hours
to honey, to silence,
to so many births and travails,
that clock fell too
and its delicate blue
viscera vibrated among
the broken glass,
its long heart
uncoiled.

Life grinds away
glass, wearing out clothes,
tearing to shreds,
crushing
forms,
and what lasts in time is like
an island or ship at sea,
perishable,
surrounded by fragile dangers,
by implacable waters and threats.

Let's put everything once and for all, clocks,
plates, glass carved by the cold,
in a sack and take our treasures out to sea:
let our possessions crumble
in a single alarming breaking place,
let what is broken
sound like a river
and let the sea reconstruct
with its long toiling tides
so many useless things
that nobody breaks
but which got broken.

Here's some more Neruda I've posted in the past: "Ode to the Lizard," "Ode to the Present," a bit from "Ode to Scissors," "Goodbyes," and a bit of "To the Dead Poor Man." I love Neruda.

Today's Poetry Friday roundup is here, at My Juicy Little Universe.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T04:47:00.000-08:00

I didn't blog yesterday. So sue me. It was the first day I'd missed in November. Oh well, I never signed up for NaBloPoMo officially because I was sure that would happen.

This year I am thankful for my family and friends, for my students, for meaningful work to do, for God's provision for me every single day.

Today isn't a day to feel sad, but I do feel a little sad: for the separation that is inevitable in this world, the people I miss, the brokenness that I see everywhere. And yet, in the middle of all of that, there is so much that is beautiful, so much to be thankful for.

"Friendship and goodwill a sweet invitation
Kindred in spirit and eager to share
Love in familiar and long conversations
There is the wonder, there is the wonder...
Press mud with holy fingers
Light the ineffable
Fused in the ordinary
So much to wonder, so much to wonder..." - Sara Groves

Now You Tell Me...

2011-11-22T16:15:00.000-08:00

Robert Preidt writes,

"Ever go into another room for something and then forget what you were there for? A new study suggests that simply passing through a doorway can cause you to forget why you came into a room or what you wanted to find.

'Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an "event boundary" in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,' Gabriel Radvansky, a psychology professor at the University of Notre Dame, said in a university news release."

(You can read the rest of the article here.)

So I guess coming in and out of my classroom erases my students' memories. This explains a lot.

Congratulations, Edwidge Danticat

2011-11-21T13:24:00.000-08:00

I was really happy to see that Edwige Danticat received the Langston Hughes Medal on Friday.

Talking about the Earthquake

2011-11-20T16:48:00.001-08:00

It's been a long time since I have talked much with anyone about the earthquake, and this week I had a few conversations about it. It surprised me how I reacted. First of all, the factual details are fading. My memories of that night and the week that followed are very episodic. There are moments and hours that are extremely vivid, but then the connecting times are a blank. But secondly, the emotional memories are as strong as ever, and I found my heart thumping, my breath coming more quickly, and even feelings of nausea. I started to cry in one of the conversations.

I thought I was past this. I thought I was all better.

Middle School on This American Life

2011-11-19T10:15:00.000-08:00

A Facebook friend posted that her son's middle school English teacher asked all the parents to listen to this episode of This American Life, which is about middle school. Fascinating stuff, and it provided me with something to be thankful for: we don't have middle school dances at our school.

Poetry Friday: To Toussaint L'Ouverture

2011-11-18T03:30:00.000-08:00

Image credit www.haitixchange.com

Today we have the day off school. November 18th commemorates the Battle of Vertières, a decisive victory over the French during the Haitian Revolutionary War, so I decided to post a poem about Haitian history. The Haitian revolutionary leaders captured the imagination of the romantics, including Wordsworth, who wrote a poem about Toussaint. Toussaint didn't fight in the Battle of Vertières, but after you read the poem, scroll down to read more about his story and how his influence affected the will for victory of his fellow freedom fighters.

TO TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE

by William Wordsworth

TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy of men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon's earless den; -
O miserable Chieftain! where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind.

The first line of the poem, calling Toussaint "the most unhappy of men," is a quote from Toussaint himself, who wrote, "I am made the most unhappy of men; my liberty is taken from me."

Actually, Toussaint was already dead by the time the Battle of Vertières was fought. Here's a passage about the time leading up to the battle and a description of the battle itself. You can read it here at its original website but if you do, there will be a lot of loud martial music playing while you read, so I've cut and pasted it below.

"[T]he capture of Toussaint, one of Leclerc's primary agendas, would help shatter the revolutionary spirit of the rebels in Napoleon's mind. But, what Napoleon didn't know is that by capturing Toussaint, he would simply pave the way for a ferocious Jean-Jacques Dessalines who was fighting not against the restoration of slavery, but for the total independence of Haiti.

On June 7, 1802 Toussaint Louverture was captured during a conference set up by General Brunet. There have been different theories surrounding Toussaint's kidnapping. However, whatever the view, a captured Toussaint was believed to be Napoleon's biggest mistake due to the fact Toussaint was considered the most moderate among the rebels' generals. [Toussaint died in prison in France in April of 1803.]

The toughest and meanest of the Black Generals, Dessalines, was chosen commander in chief of the indigenous army at a meeting of the army high command. According to historians, Dessalines' unshakable position was pursuing a war of extermination until the enemy is driven to the sea. "Koupe Tet, Boule Kay" (Cut their heads, and burn their houses!) was Dessalines' strongest order. He had no room for prisoners of war.

Meanwhile, General Leclerc would later succumb to the deadly yellow fever and was replaced by his second-in-command General Rochambeau in a desperate attempt to put down the revolt. By early October 1803, Dessalines's bloody offensives against the French forces had generated results. Port-au-Prince, Les Cayes, Le Cap fell under the control of the slave army who fought their last battle at Vertières on November 18, 1803. Haitian General François Capois later called "Capois-La-Mort" had also proved himself as a fierce and unshakable fighter among the rebels as heavy cannon bullet killed his horse. The Black fighters attacked ferociously the remaining French soldiers, and the latter, demoralized, defeated, and numbering no more than 3,000 were driven back to Mole Saint-Nicolas, where they gave up to a fleeing British fleet rather than facing the wrath of Dessalines' forces.

This event marked the end of slavery as well as Napoleon's plan to conquer North America. Haiti was born and the first black independent nation in the new world was established on January 1st, 1804.

The Haitian Revolution served as a model of courage. It sent tremors throughout the Caribbean and the United States slave plantations. Therefore, many slave revolts were sparked in the Caribbean including the Lesser Antilles such as Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia and Jamaica. In the U.S. the leaders of the three largest slave revolts, Gabriel Prosser (1800), Nat Turner (1822) and Denmark Vesey (1831), were inspired by the success of the Haitian Revolution. In addition, the most profitable aspect of that revolution was the purchase of the Louisiana territory by the United States for $15,000.000 (15 cents an acre for more than 2 million sq km (800,000 sq mi) of land extending from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains).

Napoleon Bonaparte had to cede Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson, then President of the United States, as he realized without Haiti he had little use for Louisiana where he wanted to extend a great French Empire. He also needed funds to support his military ventures in Europe as he was facing renewed war with Great Britain. This greatest real estate bargain of all time more than doubled the size of the United States, making it one of the largest nations in the world. There is no way that Napoleon would have surrendered New Orléans and all of Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson but for that Haitian Revolution. If Haiti had lost the war in 1803, many could indeed acknowledge that the United States might be different today!

Nevertheless, not that many people know about such this extraordinary event that took place more than 200 years ago and changed as well as redefined the world. The Haitian Revolution connects to all those whose people were enslaved or whose lands were colonized. The November 18, 1803 battle is still reverberating today and reminds us of real freedom although Haiti has been paying for it ever since."

Today's Poetry Friday roundup is here, at The Opposite of Indifference.

Whinging

2011-11-17T04:38:00.000-08:00

Don't you love that word, whinging? I was using it around my family recently and was surprised to learn that they didn't know what it meant. Someone even asked if it was a new word. Nope. According to Merriam-Webster, "Origin of WHINGE: Middle English *whingen, from Old English hwinsian; akin to Old High German winsōn to moan. First Known Use: 12th century." (Source.) Anyway, whinging is what I feel like doing. It means moaning, complaining, whining.

I'm thankful that this is the last school day this week. (Tune in tomorrow for a post about the holiday we'll be celebrating.) For whatever reason, I've been struggling a bit with my teaching lately. I hate to even admit that, but I was talking to a colleague and she used the word "defeated" to describe another teacher's recent mood, and it struck me that maybe we don't talk enough about how difficult it is sometimes to keep coming back day after day to teach kids who don't seem to be getting it, or in some cases, don't want to get it.

So here goes.

I know better than to take the vagaries of middle-schoolers personally. I frequently advise other teachers not to. I know that the only way I can be loved by the majority of my students is in retrospect, and I take great pleasure in the visits of high school students who inevitably walk into my room, look around, sigh nostalgically, and say, "I miss your class!"

Nevertheless, in spite of knowing I should hold out for high school students to express that they remember my classes fondly, and not expect any appreciation from students while they are under my care, I do find myself taking the hostility personally sometimes. And I've been doing that lately. When the kids would rather talk among themselves and pass notes rather than pay the slightest bit of attention to my lessons, when they ask me the same question seven or eight times, not because they didn't understand but because to them I sound like the teacher in Peanuts ("Wa wa wa wa wa wa."), when they vandalize my bulletin boards (OK, "vandalize" might be a strong word, but they do pull out the staples and sometimes even remove parts of the borders from the bulletin boards in the hallway, which aren't under my direct surveillance), I sometimes take those things personally. I just want everyone to love me! Is that too much to ask?

Well, clearly it is too much to ask, and in my more rational moments, I know that. What's important is continuing to do my very best, teaching as well as I possibly can, treating the kids fairly and consistently, providing many opportunities for them to practice reading and writing. And that I will continue to do.

But I might still whinge occasionally.

You Smell Just Like a Book!

2011-11-16T10:31:00.000-08:00

Perfumer Christian Brosius hates perfume. He even named his company "I Hate Perfume." Here's part of his manifesto:

I hate perfume.

Perfume is too often an ethereal corset trapping everyone in the same unnatural shape

A lazy and inelegant concession to fashionable ego

Too often a substitute for true allure and style

An opaque shell concealing everything – revealing nothing

A childish masque hiding the timid and unimaginative

An arrogant slap in the face from across the room

People who smell like everyone else disgust me

(You can read the rest here.)

Instead of mass-produced perfume, Brosius makes individual creations. And one of them smells like a library. He writes:

Whenever I read, the start of the journey is always opening the book and breathing deeply. There are few things more wonderful than the smell of a much-loved book. Newly printed books certainly smell very different from older ones. Their ink is so crisp though the odor of their paper is so faint. Older books smell riper and often sweeter. Illustrated books have a very different odor from those with straight text and this smell often speaks of their quality. I've also noticed that books from different countries and different periods have very individual scents too. These speak not only of their origin, but of their history to this moment.

In the Library is a warm blend of English Novel*, Russian & Moroccan Leather Bindings, Worn Cloth and a hint of Wood Polish.

If you want to smell like a book (and who doesn't?) you can buy this perfume here.

Twenty-Two Months

2011-11-15T12:08:00.000-08:00

Saturday was the twenty-two month anniversary of the earthquake. I've mentioned before how the twelfth of the month doesn't crush me quite as much as it used to. I started thinking about how that happens with any milestone; as it gets further behind you, the commemorations tend to get further apart.

Twenty-Two Months

At first you count every hour;
This baby is four hours old, you say.
And then it's days;
You were born yesterday!
For a while you count weeks
And then for a long, long time,
Each month you take pictures
And write special letters:
You're three months,
Six months,
Ten months
Fourteen months..
Until one day you realize
That you're only counting years.

I love you just as much, my child,
Even though I don't know
How many months old you are.

At first you count every hour;
Four hours ago I survived an earthquake.
And then it's days;
Days since I last slept peacefully,
Days since everything I thought was firm
Shook and fell apart.
Then it's months:
For almost two years the 12th of every month
Was the earthquake anniversary,
The first thing I thought of that morning,
My constant memory all day.
Three months ago,
Ten months,
Fourteen months...
Until one day you realize
That you're only counting years.

You changed my life just as much, earthquake,
Even though I don't think about you
Every single day.

A mom's precious twenty-two month old
Is someone else's grimy toddler
About to enter the terrible twos.

Twenty-two months since an earthquake
Sometimes feels like forever
But I never know what unexpected moment
Will bring back the sick fear,
The adrenaline,
The time when I counted hours, then days, then months.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Jane Austen, a Blogger?

2011-11-14T03:40:00.000-08:00

I absolutely can't resist an article whose title begins, "If Jane Austen lived today..." And this one is especially irresistible, due to the conclusion of said title: "If Jane Austen lived today, she'd be a blogger."

Dear reader, if Jane Austen lived today, she'd be an avid blogger, she'd be on Facebook, and of course she'd also be tweeting away -- but mostly about other people, not herself.

That's because Austen had a passionate fascination with people and what made them who they were, an interest that keeps the modern world fascinated by the woman who wrote novels set in small villages nearly 200 years ago, said Laurel Ann Nattress, editor of an anthology of Austen-inspired stories.

"She would definitely be on Twitter, out there having fun. Blogging, connecting with people. Facebook," said Nattress in a phone interview about her book, "Jane Austen Made Me Do It."

The book sounds great - I immediately put it on my wish list - but I think if Jane Austen were a blogger, she'd be an anonymous one. Her whole style is based on watching people while they don't realize it. When she was alive - actually alive, as opposed to an imaginary version of her - she would hide her writing when anyone came in the room.

It's interesting to see how different authors manage blogging. I just recently started reading Meg Wolitzer's blog and I've read lots of author blogs for a long time (see sidebar). Some authors post a lot, and others hardly ever do. One author blog I read went into lurid detail about the woman's private life, and then she stopped writing on it because she said it messed up her "real" writing - it didn't allow her the privacy she needed to ruminate over ideas and digest them.

I am terribly impressed with Jane Yolen as a blogger. She is such a generous online writer in general, often sharing her amazing poems as comments on other people's posts. She has really inspired me to wonder what I was saving my writing for. While I'm not in her league as a writer, and I'm not nearly as open as she is, yet, I'm going for more freedom as an online writer and less self-protection.

Back to Jane Austen. I agree with Laurel Ann Nattress (here's her blog, which has some other amazing amazing news, that P.D. James just wrote an Austen-themed novel), that if Austen were alive today she'd be a journalist or a psychologist if she weren't a novelist, because she was very interested in human beings. Her characters are some of the best anyone ever wrote. My family and I are in the middle of watching the latest BBC version of Sense and Sensibility, and it is seriously wonderful.

So would Jane Austen have been a blogger? I don't know. She was a novelist, and I am very glad she was.

Principal of Longevity

2011-11-13T02:16:00.000-08:00

She says teenagers fascinate her. It's a good thing, because she's been principal of the same junior high school for 48 years. Here's the story.

ht A Shrewdness of Apes

Reading Update

2011-11-12T08:18:00.000-08:00

I have been doing a lot of rereading lately, and I'm in the middle of several books. I haven't finished much. But here's what I have read:

Book #37 was The True History of Paradise: A Novel, by Margaret Cezair-Thompson. I picked this one up because of the Caribbean connection; it's a novel about the history of Jamaica. It's told by Jean Landing, a woman who has finally had enough of her country and is planning to leave. During the course of her drive across the country with her dear friend Paul, she revisits her whole life, plus the story of the island, told in short vignettes from the point of view of selected ancestors. There's an earthquake in the story, and there's plenty of human turmoil as well. Perhaps because of this turmoil of both kinds, I almost put the book down permanently several times, but eventually I was glad I had persisted. I got a good picture of Jamaica and what might make someone both love it and want to leave it. The epigraph of the book is a quote from V.S. Naipaul: "The history of these islands can never be satisfactorily told." I'm glad that people keep trying.

Book #38 was Mothers & Other Liars, by Amy Bourret. Although there were aspects of the storytelling that I liked, I didn't find the premise of this book convincing at all. Ruby Leander finds a baby in a trash can and her first instinct, rather than to inform the authorities, is to get a fake birth certificate and transport the child across state lines, thus committing a felony. Ten years later, Ruby sees an article in a magazine that she knows is about her child. Turns out, the baby wasn't abandoned at all, but while the mother was out driving around trying to get her child to sleep, she was carjacked and the carjackers ditched the baby. (Don't you hate it when that happens?) Now Ruby is involved with a cop and is pregnant, and her method for dealing with the whole mess is even less believable than her original act. I just didn't buy any of this, so it was hard for me to suspend disbelief enough to get into the story.

Book #39 was a YA title from my classroom, Surviving the Applewhites, by Stephanie S. Tolan. I enjoyed this one pretty well, and will be recommending it to my students.

This post is linked to the November 12th edition of the Saturday Review of Books.

Poetry Friday: Desire

2011-11-11T02:04:00.000-08:00

I've been reading the complete works of Emily Dickinson, and finding gems along the way. Here's one that makes me think of "Success is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed." It explores the idea that not having what we want may have its own pleasures. The "banquet of abstemiousness" is not one appreciated much in modern society, but I think Emily's onto something here.

Desire

Emily Dickinson

Who never wanted, - maddest joy
Remains to him unknown:
The banquet of abstemiousness
Surpasses that of wine.

Within its hope, though yet ungrasped
Desire's perfect goal,
No nearer, lest reality
Should disenthral thy soul.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Thursday

2011-11-10T13:26:00.000-08:00

On Monday I mocked our November schedule and how many days off we have. But it's only Thursday, and I am dragging, so maybe I shouldn't have been so quick to mock. A combination of illness and work and watching my children do NaNoWriMo (seriously, imagine if I were doing it myself!) and my son's inability ever to have the school uniform he needs no matter how much laundry gets done has left me yawning and stressing out about all I have to do. In reality, I have no more than in a normal week, so I'm not quite sure why it seems so overwhelming.

In any case, as I struggle to the end of the one five-day school week in November, here's something great to listen to. "Life is what you make of it: so beautiful or so what."

Come back tomorrow for a poem.

Haiti: Horrific?

2011-11-09T01:40:00.000-08:00

Photo Credit: Omaha World-Herald

A Haitian friend posted this article on Facebook yesterday and commented that she didn't like it much. Maybe, she said, she was being oversensitive.

Well, first of all, the title: "Haiti: Horrific Beyond Expectations." It does tend to make a Haiti-dweller feel a little defensive. After all, fifty percent of the rubble has been cleaned up! After all, lots of the tent cities have been cleared! (Where did all those people go, though?) The feeling reminds me of when friends visited us in our first Haiti apartment and walked around shaking their heads sadly, repeating over and over, "Oh, you guys!" in sympathetic tones, as though they could hardly imagine that we could live in such a hovel. I'd complained about it some myself, but I didn't want them to think it was so very dreadful. Maybe they could have tried, "We love what you've done with the place!"

It's an uncomfortable paradox. I want people to know how bad things still are for earthquake survivors in Haiti. I posted about cholera yesterday myself, after all. I'm glad President Carter (one of my heroes) and the Habitat people are here. I recognize that there's still a lot to be done to return Haiti to the way it was before the earthquake, and then it was far from perfect. On the other hand, though, I don't want people - outsiders - talking about how horrific it is here in this quirky, awful, beautiful place. (And yes, I'm an outsider, too, even after living here fifteen years. I know that.) The article even uses the word "godforsaken." Folks, don't you know there's no such thing as a God-forsaken town? Then, too, I always complain when the US media ignore Haiti, and then complain when they write about it, too. Is there no pleasing me?

I find myself making snorting sounds in my head as I read. Apocalyptic movie set? Please. Tap-taps aren't air-conditioned? Well, boo hoo! Spotty electricity? Let me tell you about spotty electricity. It's way better now than it was when I first came to Haiti, when the country was under an international trade embargo, spearheaded by the United States - an embargo from which Haiti's economy has never really recovered.

At the same time, though, I have to say that the descriptions are not wrong. There is a lot to be horrified by in Port-au-Prince. Too many people are living in squalid, miserable, inhuman conditions almost two years after the earth shook. And the worst of it? People were living in those conditions before the earth shook. You just couldn't see them so clearly from the main roads as you drove from the airport. And I, with my self-righteous snorting, don't live in the conditions of the tent cities, nowhere close. I consider myself quite resilient, from "sturdy peasant stock," as I always say, and I know there is no way I could live the way people have been for nearly two years, basically in public, in steadily disintegrating tents, with no sanitation.

I just want to say to those people from Omaha: So, here's Port-au-Prince. Do you like what we've done with the place? We're all working to fix up our own little corner. There's still a lot to be done, as you can see. Thanks for the help you're bringing. I'm glad you think the Haitian people are amazing - you're right, they totally are. I hope you know that they don't really like having their picture taken unless they're all dressed up. They're not that thrilled with their situation, either, and they feel a little sensitive about people driving past them in tour buses taking pictures. (But I drive by and take pictures too. I get it that you have to document it, before you get used to looking at it.) I hope you get to eat some delicious Haitian food while you're here, and attend a Haitian church service and hear people praise God like you've never heard in Omaha, I'm betting. And again, thanks for coming.

More on Cholera

2011-11-08T04:20:00.000-08:00

This article from The Guardian details the current situation with cholera. An excerpt:

"Cholera thrives where water systems are weak and sanitation poor. A history of poverty, natural disaster, neglected public water and sanitation systems, and under-resourced health infrastructure has magnified the impact of cholera in Haiti. It is estimated that 80% of Haitians do not have access to latrines and more than half of the population lacks access to safe drinking water."

And here's a photo feature from the same site.

November is a Month of Holidays

2011-11-07T12:28:00.001-08:00

We're back to school today for the only full month in November. Five school days at once; however will we manage?

The first two days of November are holidays: All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day. Next week we have Friday off for Vertières Day. And then of course there's Thanksgiving; although we don't celebrate most American holidays at our school, that's one we can't skip. We get Thursday and Friday off.

I won't complain about holidays, but it's not easy to get much done in class in November. And then of course there's December, which has its own craziness.

An Undivided Heart

2011-11-06T14:35:00.000-08:00

Teach me your way, O LORD, and I will walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name. Psalm 86:11

I've thought about this verse a lot, and wondered what it would be like to have an undivided heart. It sounds incredibly restful to me sometimes. I don't think I've ever felt that my heart was completely at home in one place. It is always divided. This started when I first went to boarding school at the age of seven, and experienced what it's like to want to be in two places, to miss my parents desperately but at the same time love school and being with my friends. My heart was divided; I couldn't choose.

In fact, maybe my divided heart started even earlier than that. I was born in the United States and then went to Africa as a tiny baby. I was from two places, heard many languages, loved both ugali and pizza, had my blond pigtails pulled by people who were fascinated by my hair.

And now I live away from most of my family and many of my friends and my heart remains divided; there's always, always someone to miss. Divided, loving more than one place, loving more people than I can count, not satisfied with seeing people I love so seldom, with one sentence on Facebook, with not knowing my nieces and nephews, or my friends' children, not being part of their lives.

I guess everyone is like that these days; none of us can live near to all the people that matter to us. I have a friend from high school who was the third generation of her family growing up in the same house, but that's not common any more, and probably I romanticize what that would be like, as someone who has lived in mission housing, or rented houses or apartments, since my birth. It's a missionary kid cliche that we can't tell where we're from; there's no place on this earth where I feel rooted.

Maybe that's not what the verse means; it's talking, after all, about loving God above all others. Other versions of the Bible use language like "purity of heart," "unite my heart," even "focus my heart." God can focus my heart even as I flit about from one task to the next, from one need to the next. Even as I hurt with absence from people I love.

"Some day," posted an MK friend on, yes, Facebook, today, "there will be no goodbye." I can't imagine that day. It brings tears to my eyes to try to picture it. A day of hellos.

Vacation

2011-11-05T15:57:00.000-07:00

This time last weekend I was at the beach. I consider myself blessed in so many ways, and one of the greatest is being able to go to the beach in November. November 1st and 2nd are holidays here, and at school we traded the 31st for the 2nd; in other words, we had the 31st off and had our in-service on the 2nd. There's nothing as relaxing as the ocean, and a long weekend soaking in seawater was just what we all needed.

Poetry Friday: First Love

2011-11-04T15:11:00.001-07:00

I chose this poem for today because I have a fourteen-year-old who is currently in love with Mr. Knightley, from Jane Austen's Emma. Don't you remember falling for a musician or an actor or a character in a book or, as in this poem, someone in a painting? Be sure to follow the link to read the rest of the poem, and the surprise ending.

First Love
By Jan Owen

(Titan’s Young Englishman with a Glove, circa 1530)

It happened in Physics,
reading a Library art book under the desk,
(the lesson was Archimedes I recall)
I turned a page and fell
for an older man, and anonymous at that,
hardly ideal—
he was four hundred and forty five,
I was fourteen.
“Eureka!” streaked each thought
(I prayed no-one would hear)
and Paradise all term
was page 179
(I prayed no-one would guess).

Here's the rest.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Seven Billion

2011-11-03T03:00:00.000-07:00

Photo Source: Time.com

On Monday, the world's population hit seven billion. Of course that day was just chosen randomly to represent the seven billion mark; nobody really knows exactly how many people there are in the world. It's estimated that 382,000 babies were born worldwide on Monday. But a baby girl in the Phillipines was chosen as the symbolic seven billionth baby and given a cake and a gift certificate for shoes. One pair of shoes? Shoes for her whole life? It doesn't say. And she's not going to eat the cake, but maybe her mother got some of it. It may be just me reading my own experience into this photo, but I don't think that mother looks very thrilled to have cameras around as she lies there in her bed cuddling her baby. I think she's thinking, "Go away and leave me alone with Baby Seven Billion." She's quoted in this article as saying, "She looks so lovely."

Here's an interview with the UN Population Fund Executive Director, in which he reflects on this milestone for the planet and looks ahead to the time when there will be eight million earthlings. When asked what advice he would give all the babies around the world, he doesn't give any advice at all, he merely states enigmatically, "I wish them interesting lives." Interesting seems a given. But how come only Danica gets free shoes?

Cholera

2011-11-02T04:00:00.000-07:00

I mentioned cholera in my post yesterday. This epidemic, while not as much in the news as when it began just over a year ago, continues to rage. Read this blog almost any day and you'll find references to people dying of cholera. Paul Farmer, who is the UN's deputy Special Envoy to Haiti and a doctor himself, says that this outbreak is now the worst in the world and close to being the number one cause of death by infectious disease in Haiti. Nearly five percent of the population of Haiti have contracted cholera and more than six thousand people have died.

Cholera is easy to prevent; just wash your hands, with clean water and soap. But wait. What if you don't have access to clean water? Then what? This is why cholera is a disease of emergencies and natural disasters, times when clean water supply is disrupted. It's also a disease of poverty. I'm not worried about getting cholera because I have clean water to wash with. If I do get sick, I have access to health care. But for many people in this country, clean water and health care are both unattainable.

Read these five prevention messages, and they seem simple. Use safe water, wash your hands, use latrines, cook food well and peel raw food, clean up safely. And then read them again, imagining that you live in a tent, with no reliable source of clean water. Boiling water requires fuel, which costs a lot of money. Most people don't have jobs. Now you can see some of the challenges.

I was very struck by this interview given by photographer Ben Depp. He talks about some horrifying pictures he took of a dying cholera patient. He also talks about his own recovery from the trauma of the earthquake and how he deals with taking pictures in Haiti. Read all the way through to the last paragraph; Ben's words still have me pondering.

November

2011-11-01T11:48:00.000-07:00

It's November, and you know what that means: Nanowrimo! Two members of my household are doing Nanowrimo this year; one, my ninth grader, has the standard goal of 50,000 words, and I have no doubt she'll do it, since she did last year. My third grader is trying too, and has a goal of 10,000 words.

I'm going to try to post on my blog every day. I know, it's pitiful in comparison, but hey, while my daughter has been writing since one this morning, taking breaks only for food and for carrying laundry up to her room, I had to spend all morning grading (oh, and I did sleep some, too).

While contemplating Nanowrimo and Nablopomo, I went back and read what I posted last November. I didn't succeed in posting every day, but I did put up forty posts in the course of the month, so it averaged out. Reading my words from a year ago shows me how far I have come since then; I was still in the throes of recovering from the earthquake, and now I go days without thinking about it. On September 12th, it was mid-morning before I remembered it was the 21-month anniversary, and in October, I didn't remember the 22-month anniversary until the 14th. Time really is healing, and my surroundings are returning to normal, too; according to this article, about half of the debris from the earthquake has now been cleaned up. Last November the figure in the media was 4%. Don't get me wrong, Haiti is still facing many challenges, such as cholera, unemployment, poverty, and an estimated 500,000 people still living in tents because of the earthquake.

Since it's the first of the month, it's also Theme Day for the City Daily Photo blogs. Today's theme is Fences, and you can see thumbnails of participants' photos here.

Poetry Friday: Machines

2011-10-28T06:02:00.001-07:00

Another week with no posts between Poetry Fridays. I've been doing better about posting during the week, but what a week this was. We had our accreditation visit, a fire, electrical problems. But we're coming up on a week with several vacation days, so we will have a chance to recover.

Meanwhile, today's poem compares a beautiful piece of music to a bicycle. I read that Steve Jobs wanted to call the first Mac computer the Bicycle, because a bicycle is so elegant and simple and perfectly designed. I love the way the poem acknowledges that in creating beauty, "so much is chance," and I love the phrase, "effortless gadgetry of love." I'm just posting the first two stanzas, and these quotes are from later in the poem, so be sure to follow the link to read the rest.

Machines

Michael Donaghy

Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsicord pavane by Purcell
And the racer's twelve-speed bike.

The machinery of grace is always simple.
This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected
To another of concentric gears,
Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected,
Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers.
And in the playing, Purcell's chords are played away.

Here's the rest of the poem.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Villain

2011-10-21T12:20:00.000-07:00

I started reading a draft from one of my students, and two lines into it I gasped. This was about me. I was the one who had caused this girl enough negative emotion to write the best thing she had written all year, something deep and heartfelt instead of the surface-y creations she had dashed off in order to satisfy my requirements.

Her work caused emotion in me, too. It hurt me enough that I had to put aside my grading for the evening. It made me cry. It was intended to sting, and it did.

But. As I thought about this more, I realized that I have taught my students that one way they can respond to pain, whether caused by an earthquake or a friend or - yes - an unfair teacher, is to write about it. And I realized that I have created a classroom environment where she feels safe writing about how angry she is with me. What kind of hypocrite would I be if I threw a fit and forbade her to write about the first thing that has moved her to good writing this year?

We did talk about her work. We talked about it as writing and I shared my interpretation of what had happened, which differed from hers. And then I did what I had taught her to do. I wrote about it.

Villain

It has come to my attention
that I am the villain in your story.

I knew I wasn't the heroine,
Because I never saved you from a burning building
Or carried you across a river
Or rescued your kitten.
But villain?

Please.
I do not even own a black cape.
I have no secret lair and no scary weapons.

What I am is your teacher
And you are a middle schooler.
And I guess those facts alone are enough for a villain's role.

You say I am lying in wait
Hoping you will mess up,
Taking pleasure in your failures.
You say I am accusing you
Of things you do not do.
You say I ruin your day.
I take your beautiful name
And write it upon my bad list,
The list of those who are In Trouble.
The injustices I visit upon you are legion.

For now, I am the villain in your story.
Surely no miscreant worth her salt would let that hurt her feelings
So I try to harden my heart.

I hope, dear student, that I am the worst villain you ever encounter
And that the ruination of your day caused by me
Is the low point of your life.
I hope that the stories you have to tell of me and my evil
Will be, by far
The most traumatic
Recounted at your class reunions.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

(By the way, this week I was introduced to a new collection here. I wrote and asked Steven Withrow to send me the pdf of his book, Crackles of Speech. I'm very much enjoying it and I recommend you do the same!)

Dessalines Day

2011-10-17T05:10:00.000-07:00

Today we have a peaceful, quiet day off school to celebrate Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who was anything but peaceful and quiet. He was brutally treated as a slave, and he in turn was brutal to his enemies. He had the nickname "The Tiger" because of his ferocity in battle and

"Fearing a French resurgence and the reinstatement of slavery that would accompany it, he ordered the massacre of approximately 5,000 of the island’s white men, women, and children declaring 'I have saved my country. I have avenged America.'"

The effects of slavery on this world are horrifying and long-lasting. In honor of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, let's keep fighting slavery of all kinds wherever we find it.

Photo Source: article on Jean-Jacques Dessalines from Wikipedia.

Poetry Friday: Happiness

2011-10-14T07:10:00.000-07:00

I did well the first week of October with my posting, but this past week was super-busy, with the end of first quarter arriving today. I did get everything graded (except for a quiz that I'm giving today and still hoping to get posted before I go home -- we'll see how that goes).

I read this article this morning about comparative happiness across international boundaries. I've blogged about this idea before (here and here, for example). I'm fascinated by efforts to compare people's levels of happiness. As the article in the first link points out, the results vary wildly according to the kinds of questions researchers ask. The researchers discussed here got very different answers based on whether they looked at "Life Satisfaction" or "Positive Feelings." They did find that Haiti is the second most unhappy country in the world, based on life satisfaction.

I will be looking into this more and following some of the links, and maybe posting again, but for Poetry Friday today I want to share a poem that I wrote a few months ago called "Happiness."

Happiness

Feelings are the caboose,
They told us in Sunday school.
Faith is the engine,
And sometimes the emotions will follow,
But if they don't, oh well.
If the caboose gets buried by an avalanche
On the way through the mountain pass,
So be it.
At least you know what you believe.

But sometimes
Happiness comes as a gift
And it's no caboose, but a whole long train,
The kind that keeps you waiting
At the railroad crossing
For half an hour,
Listening to the whistle
And counting the cars as they go by,
Marveling at just how many of them there are.

by Ruth, from www.thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Grading

2011-10-08T14:35:00.001-07:00

Next Friday is the last day of the quarter, and I'm deep in the piles of grading. I really do keep up on my grading all along throughout the quarter - I respond to piles of drafts every day, and most of the final copies I'm seeing now are versions of pieces I've already read. But then there are the ones that were scribbled in class on the final due date. Not surprisingly, those are usually not as much fun to read.

I worked hours today and now I need to stop. I reach a saturation point when I'm grading writing. I know it's time to quit when either I'm getting super-critical or I'm just slapping grades on the papers in some kind of auto-pilot mode.

The rest of the papers will still be there on Monday.

Sidetracked by Poetry

2011-10-07T17:55:00.000-07:00

I'm supposed to be grading papers, but instead -- shh, don't tell -- I was reading Poetry Friday posts. That's how I found out about this new poetry anthology. The temptation was too great for me and I bought it ($2.99, delivered immediately to my Kindle). And now I'm reading it instead of what my students wrote.

This is a very cool concept. A poet chooses a photo from this collection and writes a poem about it, then tags another poet. That poet chooses another photo to write about, but has to include at least three of the words from the previous poem.

Well, after all -- it is Friday night. My husband is at a school activity, my kids are happily watching Dr. Who, and I'll have time to grade tomorrow.

Poetry Friday: Lost

2011-10-07T03:18:00.000-07:00

Well, I didn't do much this week that I'm proud of, other than calmly facing down a tarantula, that is, but I did blog every day. Hooray! It wasn't profound, but at least I didn't go all week between Poetry Friday posts without blogging at all, the way I did every single week in September.

Yesterday a student told me that he was going to write something awesome in Writer's Workshop, and later when he was wandering around and socializing with his neighbors, I reminded him that he needed to sit down and focus, and then the awesomeness would find him. This poem says basically the same thing, if a bit more eloquently.

Lost
David Wagoner

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
...
Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

Here's the rest.

Trying to sit still, Here, in Port-au-Prince, and let the awesomeness find me.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Excitement in Eighth Grade

2011-10-06T03:29:00.000-07:00

So yesterday morning in my eighth grade class, a kid unzipped his binder and then commented, rather nonchalantly, that there was something in there. He held it up and I saw a spider, but I didn't think much of it because I assumed it was fake. I gave my best cynical "pull the other one" teacher look, and then I saw that the thing was moving. It wasn't fake; it was a very much alive, medium-sized tarantula.

Unfortunately others had also seen what I had seen, and noise and drama ensued. I zipped the binder back up and sent the kid out with it to dispose of the spider, meanwhile trying to calm down the remaining students. Of course whatever genuine fear anyone was feeling was quickly magnified into mass hysteria. Some kids were so frightened that they were forced to run full pelt out of the classroom (thus following the spider, rather than staying away from it). It took a good while for me to calm the students back down enough to read the next chapter of The Hunger Games (because that's a recipe for calm).

The spider was quickly dispatched out in the hallway, which was actually a shame because it could have joined the one that's in a cage in our library, had it survived.

Black Tie Beach 2011

2011-10-05T03:24:00.000-07:00

I needed something to make me smile, and here it is.

(Explanation of the event at the link above.)

Beethoven's First Draft

2011-10-04T04:01:00.000-07:00

I heard this very interesting piece on NPR on Sunday. University of Manchester music professor Barry Cooper reconstructed the first draft of a piece of Beethoven's work, even though the final version was far different.

Would any writer or musician actually want someone finding and publishing a first draft? I think most would feel more like Anne Lamott, who says in Bird by Bird,

"But the bad news is that if you're at all like me, you'll probably read over what you've written and spend the rest of the day obsessing, and praying that you do not die before you can completely rewrite or destroy what you have written, lest the eagerly waiting world learn how bad your first drafts are."

Even so, I love the idea of a lost work being found, even if it was a first draft. And I love it that the first draft was "very Beethoven."

Reading Update

2011-10-03T03:07:00.000-07:00

Book #29 of the year was Shooting Kabul, by N.H. Senzai. I was looking for a new readaloud to start the year with, and I did end up using this one. I like to begin eighth grade with something about culture clashes, and this was especially appropriate because of the anniversary this fall of September 11th, 2011. Fadi and his family live in Kabul, and at the beginning of the book they stage a daring escape, due to his mother's illness and his father's need to get away from the Taliban, who have asked him to work for them. Unfortunately Fadi's sister Mariam gets left behind. The rest of the book is about Fadi's attempts to rescue Mariam, while adjusting to a new life in San Francisco. Fadi is a photographer (hence the "Shooting" in the title, which I really didn't like - it seemed to me that the title was a poor attempt at a joke). I would like to read more by Senzai, although my students found this one slow in places.

Book #30 was Red Kayak, by Priscilla Cummings. This one was also a possible readaloud, and I'm still not sure if I will use it. It's the story of Brady, who gets involved in a crime in a way he didn't intend, and has to decide what to do about it. He also has to deal with the losses in his own life. I enjoyed the book and I think my students would, too.

Book #31 was Truth and Consequences, by Alison Lurie. I read Lurie's Foreign Affairs many years ago and remember it as clever and interesting on Anglo-American relationships. This one was clever and interesting too, though the characters' selfishness was a little wearing.

Book #32 was from my classroom library. Leo and the Lesser Lion, by Sandra Forrester, is set in the Great Depression and is the story of Bayliss, a 12-year-old who loses her beloved brother, Leo. She survived the accident that killed Leo, and she assumes that God has saved her for a purpose. Now to figure out what that might be. I liked this book a lot and found Bayliss an appealing character.

Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, by Lizzie Skurnick, was book #33. This is a book of essays based on Skurnick's feature Fine Lines at Jezebel.com. (And yes, you should assume that stuff published on a website called Jezebel.com is rated PG13 and above.) I had read a lot of the books Skurnick talks about (and she also includes contributions from Meg Cabot, Cecily von Ziegesar, and other female writers), and I found her ruminations about them often hilarious and sometimes very touching. She includes a chapter on books she can't believe anybody let her read and I can't believe it either! (Although I am extremely embarrassed to admit that I had read one of the books she reviewed, when it was being surreptitiously passed around in my high school.) Skurnick is part fangirl and part literary critic and her writing, while peppered with four-letter words, is difficult to put down.

I found book #34, The Glorious Ones, by Francine Prose, to be a quick and slight read. It's about a commedia dell'arte troupe and the personalities in it, all of whom have secrets.

Book #35 was in a box of donated books. I have read a lot of the Alan Gregory mysteries by Stephen White, and when I looked at this one I thought I hadn't read it. I realized on the first or second page that I had, but I finished it anyway. Alan Gregory is a clinical psychologist and I always find these books fascinating, both for the psychology and for the character development. As usual with thrillers, I couldn't remember how this one turned out, so the suspense worked on me just as well as the first time. The book is called Private Practices.

A Theory of Relativity, by Jacquelyn Mitchard, was book #36. I thought I hadn't read the last book and actually had; this one I thought I had read but actually hadn't. It's the story of a baby whose parents are both killed in an accident and the custody battle that ensues. The twist, and the source of "relativity" in the title, is that the baby's mother was adopted and due to some loopholes in the state law, the maternal uncle and grandparents are not considered relatives. Mitchard is usually great with character development and this book was no exception.

This post is linked to the October 8th Saturday Review of Books.

God is so Good

2011-10-02T03:41:00.000-07:00

I was reading this post yesterday about the song "God is so good." Aaron said that it was an "old school song," and he's right. He added that its message is timeless, and he's right about that too.

When I was growing up in Kenya, it seemed like we sang this song almost every time we would get together with a group of Christians. One of the things we liked to do was to sing it in the language of everyone present. When you get a group of Africans together, there are always at least two or three languages represented, and usually many more than that. Often it would take a long time to get through everyone's language, affirming again and again that God is so good.

When we traveled to churches in the States, this song was the one my brothers and I had to sing, dressed in our matching clothes, in three languages. We'd sing it in English, Kipsigis, and Swahili. Man, we were cute. I even remember one time when both my brothers refused to sing and I did a solo. (I'm guessing neither of my brothers remembers this.)

I sometimes think that I spent my childhood singing this song and the rest of my life learning how true it is. Aaron has it right in his post (here it is again in case you didn't go read it from the link in the first paragraph). He points out that life is very difficult for most people in Haiti, and that it might be easy to think that God hasn't been very good to this country and its people.

"And yet, God repeatedly shows himself to be not only good to the Haitian people, but good to me in a thousand daily ways. I see him meet needs and work miracles and provide supernaturally on a regular basis. I see him in the faces and the lives of the Haitian men and women that we work side-by-side with who trust him and love him simply because he is God. It's easy to say “God is good” when all your needs are met. But to see these men and women love and worship God even when many needs go un-met...when some of their needs will never be met...is humbling."

I have said it so many times on this blog, but I'll say it again: God is so good to me. Since the earthquake I have been aware in a brand new way of how much God loves me and how very good He is to me. Each blessing in my life became inexpressibly precious when I came so close to losing them all. And in that terrible time, God met my needs each day and comforted my heart through His goodness, shown to me over and over through His people.

God is so good. I hope you experience that today, too.

October, Blogging Resolution, Day Out

2011-10-01T13:09:00.000-07:00

So, the only thing I posted in September was Poetry Friday posts. Clearly this can not go on. I'm going to try to do better this month.

It's always easy to find something to post on the first of a month because that's the City Daily Photo Blogs' Theme Day. This month's theme is "Mysterious Object." You can see thumbnails here.

In addition, unlike most Saturdays, I am not working in my classroom today. I went over for forty minutes to make copies (the copiers were being serviced yesterday), but then we went out. That's right, somewhere other than home or school or church. I know. Exciting! But unfortunately I left the camera at home, so I can't show you what we saw.

First we went to a new English bookstore, called The Bookstore, on Rue Grégoire in Pétionville. I suppose "new" isn't the right word, since someone we talked to in the store told us that it was open before the earthquake, then closed for about a year, and then reopened. I had heard all about it from parents at the Parent/Teacher Conferences, and I was excited to check it out for myself. There's not a lot of selection, but it's exciting to have English books available here at all, and rumor has it that the owner will be happy to order specific titles. There's also a little cafe with drinks and sandwiches for sale. We had lunch there and bought a book each; we want to support this business, in hopes it will stay around!

After that we drove up to the Montana Hotel, where we'd heard there was a Memorial Garden. This is where I really wished for my camera. Here's an article from the one-year anniversary of the earthquake, including a photo of the garden. The garden is very small, but there's a sign with January 12th, 2010 on it and some metal bird sculptures. I felt very sad and the whole place felt subdued to me, compared to the way it used to feel.

This was our first time to the Montana since the earthquake; we had been there probably two weeks prior to it to see the new construction; a beautiful shopping plaza was just going in. Now that is all gone, as well as the main hotel building itself. The pool and restaurant are still there. There's a lot of landscaping and construction work going on. I'll try to go back again soon and take the camera. Here's something I posted about the Hotel Montana in January 2010.

Poetry Friday: Sonnet 29

2011-09-30T15:03:00.000-07:00

I love this poem. Typing it out is a pleasure. How blessed I am, and yet how much time I waste wishing I were like someone else. Indeed, when I value my blessings rightly, I scorn to change my state with Kings.

And yes, once again I've gone all week without posting. Sorry.

Sonnet XXIX
William Shakespeare

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possest,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising -
Haply I think on thee: and then my state,
Like to the Lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at Heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with Kings.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Hold That Thought

2011-09-23T05:35:00.001-07:00

It's Friday again! How does that happen so fast?

Today I have an original poem for Poetry Friday. I have been learning a lot lately about the beauty of other people, and appreciating how wonderful family and friendship are. Sometimes I feel guilty for having my focus on my own little world, and protecting myself so much from all of the pain and injustice Out There. I do still care about the World At Large, but so often I find myself shying away from it in this season of my life and focusing on what I feel I can do something about: my family, my friends, my classroom.

Anyway, this is that kind of poem.

Hold That Thought

I'll hold it carefully,
Gently in my hand
Like the most beautiful royal blue marble
You ever won on the playground,
Like the last bite of a chocolate bar.
I'll fold it up and store it away
Like a scrap of cloth of gold
Or the map to El Dorado.
I'll hide it by moonlight
(I'll never tell where).
No one will find it
Even with pickaxes and bloodhounds.
Your thought, my friend, is safe with me.
I'll hold that thought.

by Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Today's Poetry Friday roundup is here.

Poetry Friday: Hurry

2011-09-16T15:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Janet left this comment on last week's Poetry Friday post here at my blog: "Okay, this is your last day before Friday to post something other than a Poetry Friday post. Waiting, waiting..."

Janet, I'm hanging my head in shame. Once again I went a whole week without posting between Poetry Fridays. And as Friday ebbs away with Parent/Teacher Conferences, grading quizzes, and finally some family time with my coughing son, exhausted husband (he was up with said son in the night), and happy daughter (she found some recordings today of Tolkien reading some of his work), I was starting to wonder if there would even be a Poetry Friday post this week. While I don't want Poetry Friday to be the only thing on my blog, I also don't want there to be nothing at all for my visitors to read.

I guess life must be back to normal for me, because week after week goes by filled with ordinary days, ordinary frustrations. Last week we had the twenty-month anniversary of the earthquake and the first time I thought of it was at quarter to seven in the evening. This was the first time the anniversary did not fill up my day; each month up until now, I have been aware of significance all day long on the twelfth. It's good to be more me again, but at the same time I never want to lose the sense of urgency the earthquake gave me, the desire to savor each day.

Today I found this poem:

Hurry

By Marie Howe

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store
and the gas station and the green market and
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,
as she runs along two or three steps behind me
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?
Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,
Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry—
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

I don't want to hurry through the days; I want to take time to appreciate them. Yes, I have to grade those quizzes, but there's time for some poetry too.

You can see what other people posted for Poetry Friday here.

And Janet, I really will try next week to post something other than Poetry Friday!

Poetry Friday: Afternoon on a Hill

2011-09-09T11:17:00.000-07:00

Another week with no posts between Poetry Fridays! I've got to do something about that.

I keep thinking I need something serious this week, with the disasters everywhere and the anniversary of 9/11 coming up this weekend, but I keep coming back to this one. After all, what better time to appreciate what is beautiful in our world, to appreciate it this afternoon, because it might not be there tomorrow? The line I love most in this poem is "I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one." Can we enjoy the world around us without needing to possess it or exploit it or develop it? Taking nothing but photos?

Afternoon on a Hill
Edna St. Vincent Millay

I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.

I will look at cliffs and clouds
With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
And the grass rise.

And when lights begin to show
Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
And then start down!

I wish I could spend this afternoon on a hill, but sadly I must grade instead. Here's today's roundup.

Poetry Friday: Fireflies and Songs

2011-09-02T14:24:00.000-07:00

Another week with nothing posted between Poetry Fridays! This week I have been enjoying Sara Groves' new album, which is available here only - it doesn't really come out until October. Today, I decided to post one of her older songs for my Poetry Friday offering.

Fireflies and Songs
by Sara Groves

thirty years ago I was a little girl
riding in the back seat of the car
a woman sang you don't bring me flowers anymore
I felt a sadness in my little heart

we're looking for the music
in the music box
tearing it to pieces
trying to find a song

I was drawn to you in ways I can't explain
we fought like crazy but I couldn't stay away
piled on expectations and lots of blame
like we couldn't do it any other way

we're looking for a firefly
moving through the night
staring at the one place
swear it never lights

were you surprised our hearts were not like ticking clocks
with faces and hands easy to read
we both wished if only in the land of oz
longed for things we'd never really need

now we're standing in the kitchen
all pretense is gone
you kiss me on the shoulder
fireflies and song

And here she is singing it:

Tricia has the Poetry Friday roundup here, at the Miss Rumphius Effect.

Poetry Friday: Girls' Middle School Orchestra

2011-08-26T13:57:00.000-07:00

Although Irene left us alone, it looks as if she's not going to be equally kind to the east coast of the United States. I feel almost guilty being spared, and yet after a day off on Tuesday, we end our second week of school with just ordinary problems to deal with. I overdid it in seventh grade today and left too little time at the end for kids to get their work in, and they were confused and frustrated. My son had a stomach ache and stayed home from school (though he seems fine now). The power was off for an hour this afternoon and we sweltered together in the dark classroom.

Mostly, this day was good. I graded student work and felt again how blessed I am to get to see these kids' thoughts. (A mom at our open house last night told me that her kids didn't want to show her their writing "because it gets too personal." And yet I get to read it.) I came home early to be with my son and fell asleep reading Harry Potter to him; he tiptoed away and left me to my nap. And I found this poem, which seems to me to sum up perfectly the muddling through of some days, the way something beautiful, or in this case, "almost beautiful," sometimes comes out of our efforts.

Girls’ Middle School Orchestra

By Michael Ryan

They’re all dressed up in carmine
floor-length velvet gowns, their upswirled hair
festooned with matching ribbons:
their fresh hopes and our fond hopes for them
infuse this sort-of-music as if happiness could actually be
each-plays-her-part-and-all-will-take-care-of-itself.
Their hearts unscarred under quartz lights
beam through the darkness in which we sit
to show us why we endured at home
the squeaking and squawking and botched notes
that now in concert are almost beautiful...

Here's the rest.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

More on Irene

2011-08-24T12:24:00.000-07:00

We had the day off school yesterday, since Irene was predicted to bring us wind and rain. She didn't. It rained briefly a couple of times during the day, but mostly it was a normal day, if a little more overcast than usual.

We're back at school today. It's more overcast than yesterday, but still not much rain. People who live up the mountain report there was some moderately heavy wind this morning.

It's always good when things are less dreadful than forecast.

Go Away, Irene

2011-08-22T08:22:00.000-07:00

Graphic from weather.com

This time of year, we spend a lot of time at this website, and right now the picture we're staring at is of Hurricane Irene. She's supposed to make landfall on Hispaniola tonight or tomorrow morning. Of course, we'd just as soon she skipped us completely. Some estimate that as many as half a million earthquake refugees are still living in tents around this city. And even people under more substantial shelter are at risk from mudslides, flooding caused by heavy rain, and damage from high winds.

Lord, have mercy.

Poetry Friday: Did I Miss Anything?

2011-08-19T11:13:00.000-07:00

Don't you love it when students come late to school, or miss a class, and then ask you, "Did I miss anything?" How often I have been tempted to answer sarcastically. But this poem does a much better job than anything I could come up with.

Did I Miss Anything?
Tom Wayman

Nothing. When we realized you weren't here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 per cent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I'm about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 per cent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring this good news to all people
on earth

Here's the rest. (It gets even better.)

And here is today's Poetry Friday roundup.

First Draft

2011-08-19T11:00:00.000-07:00

Here's what I wrote today while my seventh graders were writing.

It's the first day of Writer's Workshop. "What shall I write about?" the kids ask. One in the back row is talking to himself in a serious voice as though coaching himself. Several raise their hands and suggest ideas: "Can I write an acrostic?" "How about a haiku?" And, of course, the old question: "How long does it have to be?"

In time, I know these kids will write wonderful pieces. I'll read poems and stories, memoirs and essays. Some will be funny and some sad. There will be adventure and science fiction and silliness, tales of earthquakes and parties, arguments and trips to Disneyworld.

But today they're all figuring it out. "Is this enough?" "Is class almost over?" "Is this good?"

It's going to be a great year.

Poetry Friday: The Radiation Sonnets

2011-08-12T04:13:00.000-07:00

This summer I found a copy of a book of poetry by the wonderful Jane Yolen called The Radiation Sonnets. I read the book in two sittings - actually two lying downs. I read a couple of them aloud to my husband with tears running into my ears.

Yolen wrote these poems while her husband was undergoing radiation treatment. Each night she would write one sonnet, and she says in the preface:

"It was a way to sort through my emotions while holding myself to a difficult task. In fact it was the only thing in my day I seemed to have any control over. For me it was unthinkable to look straight on the possibility of Death without poetic discourse."

I have found writing poetry equally therapeutic, and I loved reading these clear-eyed, unsentimental poems. My favorites include a description of her husband, weakened, taking his seven year old granddaughter birding. Yolen says that her caregiving has made her husband feel less strong as she frets about his eating and his hair loss. By contrast, being with his granddaughter restores him. "There's nothing so strengthening than to be told/ That you are a god by a seven-year-old." I also loved the one called "Letting Go," where she writes of a day when a friend takes her husband to his radiation appointment with these beautiful lines:

Yet in this first pained time we've been apart
I sensed, my dear, an infinite rehearsal:
A gap, a hole, a pinpoint in my heart,
A space for which I fear there's no reversal.

Yolen's husband died in 2006, three years after this book was published. These poems stand as a record of suffering, pain, hope, and love. I am celebrating an anniversary of many years with my husband, and have recently said goodbye to family and friends to return to Haiti; the ideas of love and loss fill my mind these days. This book made very appropriate reading.

Here's today's roundup.

In My Classroom

2011-08-08T20:29:00.001-07:00

Working in my classroom today helped me to feel more excited about this school year. And not a moment too soon; school starts next Tuesday. There was something about shoving the furniture around that made me start thinking about how I want to handle things this year, what's going to be way better, what kind of behavior I will never tolerate this time around. I am such an effective teacher when there are no kids in the room.

I took some before and after pictures - before doing anything and after one day. Maybe next week I will post some, when I am completely finished with getting everything ready.

Summer Reading

2011-08-08T04:42:00.000-07:00

I didn't read as much this summer as I usually do, but I did finish some books. Here they are:

Book #24 was Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, by Jon Krakauer. My brother-in-law loaned me this book with high recommendations. I found it difficult to plow through, not because it isn't well-written and well-researched, but because of the violence and the abuse that it explores. It's a story of people who kill because they believe God wants them to, of the juxtaposition between violence and fundamentalism. I haven't read anything else by Jon Krakauer except his expose of Greg Mortenson's stretching of the truth in Three Cups of Tea, but I would like to read more of his work.

Book #25 was The Red Queen, by Philippa Gregory, a sequel to The White Queen, which I read back in May. I'm not very familiar with this period of British history, the Wars of the Roses, and so many of the people have the same names, so sometimes it's hard going to keep track of the complications. But I'll definitely read the next one in the trilogy.

Book #26 was an Anita Shreve title, The Last Time They Met. The characters kept me reading, and there was a huge surprise on the very last page that I totally did not see coming and that made me want to start again and reread the whole book.

Book #27 was professional reading, Time for Meaning: Crafting Literate Lives in Middle and High School, by Randy Bomer. The book had great things to say about using notebooks with writing students, but I think the very best section was on teaching as craft. That chapter merits a post of its own, and I'll write one when I have the book in front of me. (I can't find it at the moment; I'm thinking it might have been one of the books that we mailed from Florida at the last minute when it became obvious that our luggage was not going to contain all the book bounty we had acquired during the summer.)

Book #28 was Okay for Now, by Gary Schmidt. This is a sequel to The Wednesday Wars, about which I raved here. It's the story of Doug Swieteck, a character from the first book, who has now moved with his troubled family. I didn't like it as much as The Wednesday Wars but it was definitely worth reading. I love the way Schmidt uses names in his books, and this one is no exception; the character we knew only as "Doug Swieteck's brother," a complete troublemaker so over the top as to be a joke, here becomes someone we can have compassion for, and whose name we learn. I think Gary Schmidt is a great writer and I am hoping he will get the Newbery one of these days.

This post is linked to the August 13th Saturday Review of Books.

Home Again

2011-08-07T10:24:00.000-07:00

I've hardly posted anything all summer except for poems, and since school is about to start again it's probably time to get back to real blogging. I had such a wonderful summer in the US, hardly thinking at all about my "real life": Haiti and my job. But on Friday we flew back, arriving with five of our eight pieces of luggage - perhaps a good metaphor for the way my heart wasn't all the way here yet. A couple of days back home have helped (and yes, the rest of the luggage arrived too), and I'm ready to start meetings tomorrow and to get my room prepared for school.

Rolling Stone Magazine published this article about the situation in Haiti right now. It's profoundly depressing reading, but sadly accurate. Next week it will be nineteen months since the earthquake. Much good work has been done, but in a piecemeal way that hasn't moved the country as a whole forward.

It feels wrong to draw in, to focus on my own little corner of the world, but that's what I end up doing because the big picture is so overwhelming. There are a few people whose lives I can help improve, and that has to be enough. I recently read this meditation, "Blessed Are Those Who Mourn," and it reminded me that even when I can't do anything about what's going on around me, there is benefit to caring about it and not shutting down. I try to find that balance. Tara put the dilemma beautifully in this post.

Meanwhile, I'm mustering up excitement about the new school year, looking at class lists, gathering up the books I bought in the US, thinking about first days. It's not glamorous, teaching twelve- to fourteen-year-olds, but this is why I'm here.

Poetry Friday

2011-08-05T11:37:00.000-07:00

Today I traveled back home to Haiti, and I'm a little too overwhelmed by transition to do a Poetry Friday post. Here's Pablo Neruda's poem "Goodbyes," which I posted earlier this week, and here's the poetry everybody else is sharing today.

Goodbyes

2011-08-03T06:50:00.001-07:00

by Pablo Neruda, tr. Alastair Reid

Goodbye, goodbye, to one place or another,
to every mouth, to every sorrow,
to the insolent moon, to weeks
which wound in the days and disappeared,
goodbye to this voice and that one stained
with amaranth, and goodbye
to the usual bed and plate,
to the twilit setting of all goodbyes,
to the chair that is part of the same twilight,
to the way made by my shoes.

I spread myself, no question;
I turned over whole lives,
changed skin, lamps, and hates,
it was something I had to do,
not by law or whim,
more of a chain reaction;
each new journey enchained me;
I took pleasure in place, in all places.

And, newly arrived, I promptly said goodbye
with still newborn tenderness
as if the bread were to open and suddenly
flee from the world of the table.
So I left behind all languages,
repeated goodbyes like an old door,
changed cinemas, reasons, and tombs,
left everywhere for somewhere else
I went on being, and being always
half undone with joy,
a bridegroom among sadnesses,
never knowing how or when,
ready to return, never returning.

It's well known that he who returns never left,
so I traced and retraced my life,
changing clothes and planets,
growing used to the company,
to the great whirl of exile,
to the great solitude of bells tolling.

Poetry Friday: A Summer's Day

2011-07-29T04:26:00.000-07:00

A search of my archives shows me that I have posted five of Shakespeare's sonnets here. But I'm surprised that I haven't posted #18, and I'm going to remedy that today. This is one of Shakespeare's most famous sonnets and it's appropriate for this last Friday in July. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" he asks, and then enumerates the reasons why his love is much better than a summer's day. He ends with a promise of immortality; she will live forever in his verse. And sure enough, five hundred years later, we're still reading his love poem to her.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Summer's lease really does have all too short a date, and the lease is almost up. Back to school in just a couple of weeks. Enjoy the last few precious days of summer.

You can find today's roundup here.

Poetry Friday: Consolation

2011-07-22T10:47:00.000-07:00

Billy Collins just knows how to put things. Here he is on the pleasures of spending the summer speaking English and hanging out with others who do the same.

Consolation
by Billy Collins

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a succession
of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

How much better to command the simple precinct of home
than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyes camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?

Here's the rest of the poem.

Here's Billy Collins reading it:

And here's today's roundup.

Poetry Friday: "How to Pay Attention"

2011-07-15T13:20:00.000-07:00

Photo Credit: Matsu

I spent a few days this week enjoying nature, and taking lots of photos, which I have yet to upload. Forests and mountains and wildlife gave so much to look at. Around every corner was another beautiful sight to capture.

This dragonfly, landing briefly on my husband, made me think of the grasshopper in Mary Oliver's poem "The Summer Day."

The Summer Day
Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

A camera helps me pay attention, focuses me on what is in front of me. Everything does die at last, and too soon. A summer day is the perfect time to pay attention to all the blessings God has given me.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: "Trying to Name What Doesn't Change"

2011-07-08T12:38:00.000-07:00

Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change
is train tracks. She’s sure of it.
The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery
by the side, but not the tracks.
I’ve watched one for three years, she says,
and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.

Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track
near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train
is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore.
The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.

Here's the rest of the poem.

And here's today's roundup.

From Haiti

2011-07-05T08:43:00.000-07:00

Tara has posted some great stuff lately, including this piece about cholera in Haiti and this one about telling other people's stories.

Excerpts:

"The patients are in the tents 24 hours per day. I have no idea how they do it especially with acute cholera.

These tents remind me of the tents in Port-au-Prince camps that are 'homes' to hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people from the earthquake. These tents and camps in the capital are pure hell.
The social dynamics in the cholera tents here at the Cholera Treatment Center are interesting and say a lot about poor Haitian society."

and

"We're sharing Haiti from one unique perspective that certainly cannot even begin to cover all of the angles. We're not experts on this culture or country. We never will be.
We're learners. We're learners that care about Haiti."

First World Problems

2011-07-01T06:28:00.000-07:00

Poetry Friday: July

2011-07-01T05:58:00.000-07:00

Rereading this post, getting ready to publish it, I notice that I've used the word "perfect" three times. You know what? I'm not even going to change it. It fits.

How could it be July already? In the last weeks of the semester I read poems with my students about summer, and many of them referred to winter. Why, I asked my students, did poets do that? Why think of winter now?

Of course we appreciate summer more because we know that winter is coming. Summer, like everything in our lives, is temporary. It's ours to enjoy now, and to remember later.

I love this poem, "Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle Received from a Friend Called Felicity," with its idea of pickling the memories of summer so that they can be enjoyed. John Tobias writes:

The bites are fewer now.
Each one is savored lingeringly,
Swallowed reluctantly.

But in a jar put up by Felicity,
The summer which maybe never was
Has been captured and preserved.
And when we unscrew the lid
And slice off a piece
And let it linger on our tongue:
Unicorns become possible again.

While I was looking for the perfect July poem this morning I found "The Months", by Linda Pastan. Here's the July segment:

July

Tonight the fireflies
light their brief
candles
in all the trees

of summer—
color of moonflakes,
color of fluorescent
lace

where the ocean drags
its torn hem
over the dark
sand.

Fireflies are the perfect metaphor, aren't they? I just saw the first one a few days ago, and all too soon I'll see the last one for this year. Those "brief candles" will go out. How precious they are, until they do.

Today's the Daily Photo Blogs' theme day, and today's theme is green. Perfect. Take a look at thumbnails here.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: I've Got Nothing

2011-06-24T20:07:00.000-07:00

Today was a day of traveling and I never got around to doing a post, but fortunately other people did.

Photography and Living: Lessons from Clyde Butcher

2011-06-21T12:50:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I posted a quote from a photographer whose work I saw in a museum. Thinking about photography reminded me of an exhibit I saw last year of Clyde Butcher's photographs.

Butcher takes huge black and white photos, mostly of nature. (You can see lots of them at his website.) I know very little about the technical aspects of photography, so the detailed descriptions of how Butcher took each photo were lost on me. However, I was struck by the comments on how he sees the world.

Butcher wrote about getting up in the morning at three or four and going out to look. He might end up taking only three or four pictures, waiting for the exact moment when the light is perfect. Sometimes he goes to national parks or other places where people go to enjoy nature, and is astonished to hear people bragging about how fast they have "done" a particular walk or sightseeing experience, as though "there and back" was the whole story. Destination has become their only focus, whereas to him, every single step is full of beauty, and he can't imagine rushing it.

People come up to Butcher while he is setting up or taking a photo, and squint at what he is doing. "What are you taking a picture of?" they ask, because to their eyes there is nothing in front of them worth recording. They can't see what he sees. People, he says, don't know how to look.

Visitors to Butcher's gallery in Florida ask him where the best place is to take good photos of the Everglades. He says "Out in the parking lot," and they think he's joking, but he isn't; there's no magical spot to make a perfect photo. You just have to know how to look.

Paying attention, looking, enjoying the journey instead of focusing on the destination. Good advice for taking pictures, for writing, for living.

Here's the link again. Go on, go look at some of Butcher's photos.

Quote

2011-06-18T15:54:00.000-07:00

"Small towns and ordinary places interest me the most. Driving on small roads reminds me of growing up in the South, where I see the music of the ghosts. It's wonderful to be a little lost on those roads, and to think feelings, not thoughts. The ordinary [becomes] particularly special." - Burk Uzzle

Poetry Friday: Love's Austere and Lonely Offices

2011-06-17T05:11:00.000-07:00

I don't know if it is true that Father's Day is the biggest day of the year for collect calls, but it wouldn't surprise me. While moms get all the flowers and gifts, dads are sometimes less appreciated. Today's poem is for dads. It's the last line that stuck with me, and that's what I used to search for the poem. At this link you can hear the poet reading it.

Those Winter Sundays
Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

To all the dads in the midst of "love's austere and lonely offices," Happy Father's Day. I hope someone takes a moment to thank you for all you do. And if not, here's a thank you from me.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Writing Every Day

2011-06-13T07:32:00.000-07:00

I have always, for as long as I can remember, wanted to be the kind of person who wrote every day. As a child and into my teen years, I filled notebook after notebook with journal entries, but many of these outpourings begin with, "It's been a long time since I've written." I wanted to write every day, and felt guilty when I didn't, but somehow I never got into that habit.

After the earthquake, I started writing much more, back to the compulsive way I used to write when I was younger. I blogged endlessly. I wrote essays and emails and speeches. I've always written poetry, off and on. I started writing more of it, and that has continued through the past year and a half as I have worked through intense emotion.

Since school got out just over two weeks ago, I have been writing a poem every day. I've mentioned this before on this blog, and talked about how much I'm enjoying it, but I wanted to post a bit more about the experience.

I keep several lists of ideas on my desktop and I jot things down as they come to mind. Two of them are connected with teaching. Nancie Atwell suggests using the concept of "Writing Territories" with middle school writers; students make a list of their territories, the things they know about or are interested in, to help them find ideas for their writing. When I first taught this lesson I made my own list and ever since, I have added ideas to it and removed others once they have found their way into my writing. Nancie Atwell also has a lesson called "Where Poetry Hides," based on a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye (this one). Atwell asks students to walk through their homes and write down a list of objects that could contain poems, like the skunks in Nye's piece. When I first taught that lesson I made my own list, and that, too, is still on my desktop. (I've made no secret of how much I love Nancie Atwell's writing and how much I want to be just like her when I grow up. I gush on and on about her here, among other places.) Then I have a less formal TextEdit file just called "Ideas," and that's where I save passing thoughts that I don't want to forget. I do this on paper, too, on little scraps and in a notebook.

All of this is to say that I have lots of ideas to write about. But you'd think that writing every day would deplete the lists, that eventually you'd run out. But my experience is the opposite. The more I'm writing, the more I'm generating ideas, so that I often find myself choosing among five or six ideas begging to be written about because I don't have time to deal with all of them. I'm constantly noticing, constantly scribbling notes to myself. It's as though I'm in a more receptive mode than usual.

I also find that when I'm writing more, my attitude about what I am writing is playful, and I put less pressure on myself. If a piece doesn't work out, I don't beat myself up as much or tell myself that I have no writing ability whatsoever. (What, am I the only person that does that?) Tomorrow's piece will be better, I think instead. I'm a writer, I think instead. How much healthier than feeling every time you write as though it has to be a masterpiece, and then being frustrated every single time because it never is. (I think graduate school really ruined me as a writer, at least for lots of years, because of the pressure I put on myself, but that's another post.)

For several years I have been sharing my writing with my students, as recommended by lots of the education writers I read. The Kelly Gallagher book I finished last week (review in this post) talks about the "Grecian Urn syndrome." Gallagher says that when he first started sharing his writing with his students, he would write it and revise it and polish it, and when he eventually showed it to them, it would be like a Grecian urn, shiny and beautiful, but not really attainable for the kids. They didn't see how he got there, but were confirmed in their view that good writing "just happens." When I'm writing all the time, I am much more in touch with the process, much more aware that it doesn't "just happen." I have more pieces to share with my kids (though of course I choose very carefully which ones), but I can also show them how it came about. So all this writing makes me a better teacher.

I've already said how much I'm enjoying writing, but I want to say it again, because it's just a revelation to me. Writing is a joy again, as it hasn't been since I was a child and wrote stories without worrying about whether they were good or bad, but just because I loved to write them. That was before grades and essay contests and writing seminars and workshops - and there's nothing wrong with any of those things. But I write now because I love to write. It almost doesn't matter if anyone reads it. (I say "almost" because of course there are a few people who read almost everything I write, once I'm ready to share it.)

I started this post by saying that I've always wanted to be a person who writes every day. Now I am. I don't know if this will last into the school year, but I'm betting it will. I love exercising regularly, and when I miss it, I feel not guilty but just less well, less alive. Writing is the same way. It makes me feel alive and happy. I'm not doing it because I feel guilty if I don't. I'm doing it because I love it. I'm a writer. I write.

Reading Update

2011-06-11T11:54:00.000-07:00

I'm finishing up lots of books that were lying half-read on my bedside table, waiting for me to have time for them. Here are some:

Book #21, Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe, by Doreen Baingana, is, as the subtitle suggests, short stories about Uganda. Specifically, the stories are about three sisters. One spends some time in the United States (as my regular readers know, I love stories about immigrants). The stories are sad and vivid.

Book #22 is the kind of book you take notes on, and I have a whole file of notes on my desktop now that I'm done. The book is Teaching Adolescent Writers, by Kelly Gallagher. This was the perfect kind of teacher book: a combination of inspiration, theory, and extremely practical stuff you can do in class tomorrow (except that it's summer, so in my case, in eight weeks or so). Especially nice was the reminder that there are quite a few things I'm already doing right. I can always use that.

This next book wasn't half-read but it's been on my shelf for a while. Every book on writing or teaching I read seems to recommend it, and I finally got it down and just read it. "It" is book #23, Stephen King's On Writing. King's advice is practical and down-to-earth, but also full of why he writes: because it's just plain fun. Listen to this:

"On some days...writing is a pretty grim slog. On others...I feel that buzz of happiness, that sense of having found the right words and put them in a line. It's like lifting off in an airplane: you're on the ground, on the ground, on the ground...and then you're up, riding on a magical cushion of air and prince of all you survey. That makes me happy, because it was what I was made to do....It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy."

In my own far-less-successful way, writing is about that for me too. Getting happy!

This post is linked to today's edition of the Saturday Review of Books.

Poetry Friday: Flooding

2011-06-10T07:21:00.000-07:00

I am still in the poem-a-day mode and very much enjoying all the writing. Some days I throw caution to the winds and write two poems.

But this week we also mourned, because Monday night a huge rainstorm caused terrible flooding in which at least 23 people were killed and also led to an increase in the number of people sick with cholera.

My first reaction to a disaster of this kind - and there have been many: hurricanes, floods, the earthquake, political unrest - is deep discouragement. Why again? Why so much suffering?

On Tuesday I wrote a poem about the flooding and about those feelings.

The Flood, Port-au-Prince, June 7, 2011

From those who have little,
Even what they have will be taken away.
Jesus said that,
And I see plenty of evidence
That it is true.

What Mackensia
Salvaged from the earthquake,
She lost in the flood.
What cholera left
To Jesula,
She lost in the flood.
What life had graciously
Allowed Marie-Claude to keep,
She lost in the flood.

Brown torrents of water
Carried it all away.
Birth certificates, food,
Beds, clothes,
And the neighbor's pig.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

My friend Shelley posted the photo at the top of this post, a photo of a mom of seven children who lost her home in the flood. Remember, these people are already earthquake survivors.

If you'd like to help Shelley and Corrigan help the people in their neighborhood, through their organization, The Apparent Project, you can find out how to do that here. Here's the website for their organization. They do amazing work with empowering women and families, helping people to earn a living through making beautiful jewelery so that they won't be forced to give up their children. So many of the orphanages in Haiti are filled with children who have living parents, parents who could not take care of their children due to extreme poverty. Here's some of what Shelley and Corrigan do when they aren't cleaning up after a flood. Hint: Donna Karan has visited recently.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

You Can Help!

2011-06-10T06:31:00.001-07:00

Would you like to help people affected by the flooding in Haiti? Do you feel overwhelmed and wonder what you could do? Here's an opportunity to give, and a matching grant will double what your money can accomplish.

You'd be giving through The Apparent Project, which works to empower Haitian parents to be able to keep their children instead of giving them up, as so many poor people are forced to when they can't take care of them. As Corrigan says in the post linked below, The Apparent Project doesn't do handouts, but this is a time of emergency.

Read this to find out more.