Sarah Kay's poem "Jakarta, January" was very relatable to me when I first read it, I don't know when, and kept it open on my desktop for future reference. (I'm trying to spring-clean some of these perpetually open tabs during NPM again this year.) The persona of the poem is teaching in an international school and navigating how to tell kids (or not) about something awful that has just happened where they live (except that they and their school are "on the lucky side of town," in Sarah Kay's felicitous phrase). That's a situation in which I found myself all too often while teaching in Haiti.
Here's the beginning of the poem:
Jakarta, January
by Sarah Kay
After Hanif Abdurraqib & Frank O'Hara
It is the last class of the day & I am
teaching a classroom of sixth graders
about poetry & across town a man has
walked into a Starbucks & blown
himself up while some other men
throw grenades in the street & shoot
into the crowd of civilians
Janice has today's line of the Progressive Poem.
1 comment:
Finally had time to read & re-read the poem you shared, Ruth. It is touching for so many, I'm sure. I've been there, having to tell my students when we were traveling about Columbine, then later, at school, about Sandy Hook, sadly, of others. What a poem to reflect our times, would wish it were not so.
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