Poetry Friday: To Toussaint L'Ouverture

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

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!

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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, by Paul Simon. "Life is what you make of it: so beautiful or so what."

Come back tomorrow for a poem.

Haiti: Horrific?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



(Explanation of the event at the link above.)

Beethoven's First Draft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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"

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

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

Poetry Friday: July

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.