Poetry Friday: In My Classroom

Once again this year I am taking and posting a daily photo, and today's prompt on CY365 is "Prism." I was trying to think of something for that prompt, and decided to look in one of my classroom dictionaries. That resulted in this photo and this haiku:

Colors of living

Tamed for classroom consumption

Black and white rainbow

This week in that same classroom, I read the following poem with my eighth graders. Aurora Levins Morales comes from Puerto Rico, where they grow sugar cane, just like here in Haiti. This poem is in my ancient classroom anthologies, already lining the walls when I first inherited this classroom about 14 years ago. I have always loved it for the way it plays with the metaphor of sugar. It's not just harmless, uncomplicated sweetness.

Sugar Poem

by Aurora Levins Morales

Poetry

is something refined

in your vocabulary,

taking its place at the table

in a silver bowl: essence

of culture.

I come from the earth

where the cane was grown.

I know

the knobbed rooting,

green spears, heights of 

caña

against the sky,

purple plumed.

I know the backache

of the machetero,

the arc of steel

cutting, cutting,

the rhythm of harvest

leaving acres of sharp spies

that wound the feet - 

and the sweet smoke

of the llaramada:

rings of red fire burning

dark sugar into the wind.

My poems grow from the ground.

I know what they are made of:

heavy, raw and green.

Sugar,

you say, is sweet.

One teaspoon in a cup of coffee...

life's not so bad.

Caña, I reply,

yields many things:

molasses

for the horses,

rum for the tiredness

of the machetero,

industrial

alcohol to cleans,

distil, to burn

as fuel.

I don't write my poems

for anybody's sweet tooth.

My poems are acetylene torches

welding steel.

My poems are flamethrowers

cutting paths through the world.

My poems are bamboo spears

opening the air.

They come from the earth,

common and brown.

I talked a little bit with the eighth graders about the history of sugar cane in this country, and the plantations that required slave labor to run. Slaves here - and in other nations where cane is grown - didn't live very long, because the work was exhausting and dangerous. One of the kids commented that everything nice has a price. Sometimes we do touch on real life in the classroom, after all.

(By the way, here's an article about one of the main things sugar cane is used for in Haiti, rum, and specifically the kind called clairin.)

Today's roundup is here.