Poetry Friday: Still More about Windows

Three years ago, I wrote for Poetry Friday about reading the poem "After the Blizzard, Outside My Window," by Lesléa Newman, from the Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School, with my seventh graders. They surprised and amused me with their reaction, and I wrote a sonnet, "Why I Can't Look out the Window," about what they said. Then last year, I shared my sonnet plus another poem, "Out the Window," that I wrote about the next year's seventh graders' comments in a class discussion on what was outside their windows.  Most of them said there was absolutely nothing interesting outside their windows, but I found their Haitian views interesting.

This year, I was looking at my window poems and thinking about what children can see out their windows in this time of unrest and confusion in our island home. Many children are sitting at home now with little to do but look out the window, since thousands of schools all over Haiti are closed. Those who look out may find burning tires, large groups of demonstrators, clouds of tear gas. Everything beautiful is still there, too, but sometimes it's hard to see it.

A bird outside a window at my house; I believe it's a gray kingbird.

As I was contemplating these thoughts and a possible poem, my husband sent me some images that have been making the rounds on social media. They show people covering windows with concrete blocks. It's typical here to protect windows, whether in homes or businesses, with metal bars, but apparently these stores wanted more; rioters have been breaking windows with rocks, so it may not be a bad idea. Windows are expensive to replace. But windows are also designed to see through.

I wrote this poem in response:


Block it Up

Block it up,
cover the glass
with concrete,
protect what’s inside
from angry crowds,
turn the window
into a wall.

Block it up,
block it up!

How will anyone see in?
How will anyone see out?

It doesn’t matter!
Better closed than smashed!
Better blocked than vulnerable!

Something there is that loves a wall.

Block it up!

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


Oh, friends, what a struggle it is to figure out how far to be open, and how far to protect ourselves and stay safe! I mean that in every possible way from entirely metaphorically to extremely literally.

Today, on this Poetry Friday, the Catholic church in this country has called for a day of prayer and fasting for an end, with peace and justice, to the crisis in Haiti. If you're so inclined, we would welcome your participation. We're tired and ready for the walls of separation to come down. We're ready to see better things when we look out the window.

Karen Edmisten has the roundup today.

Poetry Friday: Catching Up

Due to Haiti's political situation, I've been spending many days at home over the past few weeks. One thing I've done to pass the time is listen to podcasts. One of my favorites is The Slowdown, hosted by the last Poet Laureate of the United States, Tracy K. Smith. Because it's daily, I quickly get way behind, but this week I listened to a lot of them, and I wanted to share a few of the poems I especially enjoyed.

The Boatman, by Carolyn Forché

Europa Nostra, by Nathalie Handal

What Does It Say, by Tess Gallagher

Haiku, by Etheridge Knight


Jama has the roundup today, so you can be sure there will be good snacks! Happy Friday!

Reading Update

One advantage of not going to work and in fact hardly venturing beyond one's front gate is having extra time to read. Please send me suggestions of low-stress books to read. Funny books? Cheerful books? Absorbing books that will make me forget what's going on around me? Particularly books that I can download for free from the public library in the US that I frequent from afar? Leave them in the comments, please and thank you.

Book #80 of 2019 was Winter Morning Walks, by Ted Kooser. These are poems Kooser wrote and sent his friend Jim Harrison on a postcard. They are lovely and evocative and made me want to go on walks. (Here's a Poetry Friday post I wrote including a poem from this book.)

Book #81 was The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro. I didn't get this book at all, and had to force myself to finish it (because we're going to discuss it in my book group). The fault probably lies with me, because many other people have liked it a lot.

Book #82 was a re-read, Invitation to Tears: A Guide to Grieving Well, by Jonalyn Fincher and Aubrie Hills. I wrote a little bit about it here.

Book #83 was another re-read, Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver. I read it aloud to my husband, and we both liked it. I am a big Kingsolver fan, but reading this aloud made the didactic elements of the story stand out to me more than they did when I read it silently. I wrote about this book here back in 2013.

Book #84 was an old favorite, Persuasion, by Jane Austen. In spite of the troubles, two friends came over and we drank tea and talked about this book, and that was just what I needed. Incidentally, this time of reading it, this novel seems much more about dealing with difficulties than I had realized in the past. Anne's inability to have agency in so many of her life choices felt more stifling to me than I remember.

Book #85 was Aerie, by Maria Dahvana Headley. This was a sequel to Magonia, reviewed here. I really liked it, but I thought it was quite talky and I couldn't picture my students having the patience for it.

Book #86 was Educated, by Tara Westover. I had this book on hold at the library for months and months, and finally it came through. I enjoyed reading it but found the descriptions of abuse difficult. It's an amazing look at how you can live in a subculture and be completely unaware of the outside world and the way others see things. I also appreciated Westover's reflections on how memory works and how she gradually became able to look at her past with more and more courage and honesty. Recommended.

Book #87 was The Last Anniversary, by Liane Moriarty. I liked this pretty well; it kept me reading.

Book #88 was The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy, by Jeanne Birdsall. This was a recommendation from a friend for a comforting read (kind of like what I asked for in the first paragraph of this post). I enjoyed it, and the only thing that would have improved it for the purpose would have been if I had already read it when I was a tween.

Book #89 was The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C. S. Lewis. This is the ultimate comfort read, tried and true. It's the first book I read after the earthquake. When I decided I needed to read it, though, I couldn't find it. My son informed me, after hunting in my daughter's room, that all of C.S. Lewis' other books were in there, but not that one. I put out a lament on Facebook, and the next day a friend delivered a copy. It was just the ticket.

Book #90 was another re-read, Night of Cake and Puppets, by Laini Taylor.

Book #91 was a re-read, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming, by Henri Nouwen. I really liked this the first time I read it, but this time it just depressed me. I'm sure the fault is with me and not the book.

Book #92 was another read-aloud to my husband. It was written by a schoolmate of his from Japan and it's called Growing Up Gaijin: An American Kid in 1960s Japan, by Ladd McDaniel. My husband and I enjoyed this very much; it was enough removed from our current surroundings to be relaxing and fun to read, and there was a lot in it that he could relate to, having also grown up as an American kid in Japan in the 1960s.

Poetry Friday: Fire

Today I will stay home and grade student assignments and send out encouraging notes and work on cheerfulness because things could be much worse. Four weeks of lockdown here in Haiti, but I haven't been hungry and the weather is lovely. Nobody is dropping bombs on me, and that's not something everyone can say. We even got to have two half-days of school this week (and they were wonderful).

And yet...

Usually I have an idea about midweek of what I want to post for Poetry Friday, but this week I woke Friday morning not knowing. I went to Poetry Foundation to find something. Let's see, how am I feeling today, I asked my fingers, and they idly typed in: "Anger." "Rage." "Fire."

Whoa.

So anyway, here's a poem I found to post.

Fire and Ice
Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Here is a poem I wrote called "Fire." I wrote it during another time of unrest in Haiti.

Here is today's roundup.

Poetry Friday: Lockdown

So as I've mentioned in my last couple of posts, we are in lockdown status here in Haiti. Yesterday we had a half day of school - the first this week - but today we are out again, due to huge protests that are supposedly going to take place. Protesters are marching in the streets with the goal of getting the current president to resign. In the process there has been a lot of burning and looting and general chaos. Plus, the whole country has basically shut down; people aren't going to work or school, and we're all waiting to find out what happens next.

We've been attempting to continue classes by using various online tools, and in some ways I feel as though I am just pretending things are normal. For example, today is the due date for final copies of all writing in my middle school classes, and I'm trying to stick to the due date. What that means is that I'm sitting in my classroom on the almost abandoned campus, because our internet at home isn't working. (Haiti runs on imported fossil fuel. There are fuel shortages. Nothing is working correctly.) It doesn't matter; I'm still reading students' work and putting down grades. Better to grumble under my breath about punctuation errors than about things falling apart around me.

On Wednesday, when the internet was working, I was texting with C., a friend here in Haiti. (She's also in my writing group.) I told her I was getting frustrated with life in lockdown. She suggested that I make something.  She said she'd made bread and kombucha, and was feeling much better as a result. I told her I'd make a poem, and she agreed that would probably work, too. Then she added, "You are required to use these five random words in your poem. And yes, your final grade will be affected."

The words she gave me? Lilac, popcorn, domino, traffic, trampoline.

I wrote my poem. I sent it to C., remarking that only I could take those words and still wind up with an emo poem, however nonsensical. She read it to her preschooler, who giggled. I giggled too, and life felt better.

My heart is like a trampoline,
You bounce with hob-nailed boots.

The dominoes all topple
As though they were in cahoots.

The air smells sweet, of lilacs,
with popcorn undertones,

And here comes lots of traffic
to break my fragile bones.

So here I am grading, and C. has promised to give me another five random words the next time I need them. Life's as normal as I can make it at this moment.

Here's today's roundup.

First Thursday Spiritual Journey: Beauty

On this, the first Thursday in October, our host, Karen Eastlund, has invited us to reflect on the subject of beauty.

I spent a lot of time at home this month. And this wasn't the first lockdown of the year. Haiti has had a challenging year, and there have been several multi-week periods of strikes and protests. Of course the effects of this go way beyond my little life, but for my family, and for many others, what it means is virtual house arrest. We stay home because fuel is hard to come by, we stay home because our places of work are closed, and we stay home, sadly, because at times it is dangerous to go out.

So we look for beauty where we are.

I'm on my third year of a daily photo practice, where I follow prompts from the Capture Your 365 website. Yesterday's prompt was "Framing." I posted this photo:

I've been sitting on this porch watching birds during my forced staycation, rocking in that chair and peering through my binoculars and even recording some bird sounds on my phone. It's a peaceful spot, and it is beautiful to see the birds, but of course you can't see any birds in this photo. You can see the lovely stonework of the porch, and the lovely red tiles that I enjoy, and my lovely Haitian rocking chair, but you can also see many flaws.

Some of my Facebook friends were quick to comment on how beautiful the spot was, and a couple even said I should use it as a background for taking family portraits. Really, I wondered? Don't they see that the wall in front of the chair needs painting? Don't they see the barbed wire on the outer wall between the house and the road? (Nobody thinks barbed wire is beautiful.) Don't they see that the front yard is a wasteland? And that wall around the house used to be quite pretty, but last year a woman ploughed through it on her first driving lesson, and what replaced it isn't nearly as nice. You don't see my husband's bike repair equipment, because I got my son to move it for the photo, but that's usually there too. It's just like when I look at a photo of myself; I have to squint to avoid seeing all the things that are wrong and need to be fixed right away.

One of the reasons I do my daily photo project is that I want to be where I am, to appreciate what is around me instead of wishing myself elsewhere.  Sometimes the beauty is in how you look. Yes, this is a beautiful spot, and I love it. I love sitting there and exploring the beautiful world in front of me, listening to the sounds and gazing at the sights, enjoying the "good and perfect gifts" God has given me. (James 1:17 - "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the father of heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.")

I choose to focus on what's beautiful.

Check out Karen's blog to see what others have posted on this topic!

What I Learned in September

September began normally in Haiti and ended abnormally. We had two weeks of regular school before strikes and protests erupted again and sent us into lockdown for most of the last two weeks of the month.

In addition to learning more about surviving at home for days at a time and attempting to instruct my students over the internet, I also gained knowledge in a few other areas in September.

Here's an interesting article on the benefits of teaching work by living writers. I'm not sure my students give too much thought to who wrote the work they read, but I try to follow this advice when I can. I've had writers visit my classes, shown videos of interviews with writers, and shared my own work with my students. I also try to read pieces written by people their age whenever I can. You hear a lot about the benefits of talking to authors over Skype, but more and more authors are charging for this, and while I understand their need to earn a living, I don't have the resources to welcome them in.

In September I continued to pursue more knowledge of birds. And there was plenty of knowledge out there, as a groundbreaking and heartbreaking study came out this month detailing how the population of birds in North America has decreased by over 3 billion in the last fifty years.  Other bird-related things I learned: songbirds are being taken from the forests around Miami for various reasons explained in the article; house sparrows have successfully become city-dwellers around the world because they can digest gluten (bonus: I learned to identify house sparrows that live on our campus); and many fascinating facts about Audubon in this article (I've mentioned before that Audubon was born in Haiti, and this essay explores how he saw himself and how his mixed-race identity affected him - it's so interesting). On the subject of Audubon, I continued to read John James Audubon: The Making of an American, by Richard Rhodes. I'll have a complete review of that as soon as I'm done. I also learned to identify a palmchat in my yard. Palmchats are the official birds of the Dominican Republic, and they are beautiful and noisy.

Source: ebird.com

I read this article recommending books to read about the earth and climate change. While I've read some of the authors mentioned, I haven't read any of these books. 

This article is about the glories of tomatoes and the tomato season, which was a bit late this year. I loved the article, and agreed with its fulsome praise of tomatoes, but then was soon saddened to learn that its source, The Atlantic, would soon become less accessible, because the magazine is finally putting up a paywall. Oh, Atlantic, how I have enjoyed reading your articles for free! How sad I am to have to start rationing that pleasure just like I already ration my enjoyment of The New York Times, The New Yorker, and many other publications. Again, I understand why you have to make a living, but I also have to make a living and can't spend my entire salary on the privilege of reading everything there is on the internet (much as I'd like to). 

I don't think The Paris Review has a paywall yet, and I read some wonderful articles there this month. Here are two: "For the Love of Orange," "The Currency of Tears."

"School is Not Supposed to Be Fun All the Time", argues this article.  I want to discuss it with my colleagues (and will, just as soon as I can get back to school and get some of them to read it). 

I won't list lots of articles on the current situation in Haiti, but this one (in French) is especially sad because it describes how the current round of protests started on the third day of the Haitian school year (since our school is on an American calendar, we start several weeks earlier). 

I listened to many podcasts as I sat at home for the last couple of weeks of the month, and this one was especially interesting. Jonathan Martin interviews Brad Jersak. After I listened to it, I asked my husband to listen to it with me, and we're going to order Jersak's latest book so we can learn more. In addition to podcasts, I was grateful for fairly reliable internet and for Netflix. Many of my expat friends, however, were sharing this article from Christianity Today about how maybe having access to so much media from our passport countries can keep us from fully engaging in the cultures where we live. I can see the argument; it reminds me of the reason parents weren't allowed to visit us in boarding school. It's hard to adjust to a place or a situation when you are constantly distracted from it. It's a balance everyone has to find, and it's nothing new, but the internet certainly ramps it up. I for one am not going to complain about the opportunity to escape for a little while from the current situation into media, whether books or magazines, movies or podcasts. 

What did you learn in September? What should I read or pay attention to? What are your thoughts on the links I've posted?

Poetry Friday: The Republic of Poetry

The Republic of Poetry
by Martín Espada

for Chile

In the republic of poetry,
a train full of poets
rolls south in the rain
as plum trees rock
and horses kick the air,
and village bands
parade down the aisle
with trumpets, with bowler hats,
followed by the president
of the republic,
shaking every hand.


Here's the rest of the poem.

Don't you wish you lived in the Republic of Poetry today? It sounds like a better place to be than where I actually am, here in Haiti, with the lockdown and the videos on Facebook of things burning and the underlying anxiety that's been going on for over a year now. This particular lockdown is heading for the end of its second week; since September 16th, we've had a day and a half of school. I'm sending assignments to my students, and they're sending work back, but it's a little hard for them and me to focus when things are falling apart around us.

Go read about the Republic of Poetry. Nothing to see here.

Here's today's roundup.

(If you want to read about what's going on in Haiti, The Miami Herald is a good place to start.)

Poetry Friday: Unleaving

When I wrote my What I Learned in May post this year, I commented that my growing interest in birds seems to coincide with birds disappearing. I didn't realize how right I was. Yesterday's news story about the bird population in North America, and its stunning, overwhelming decline in the past fifty years, horrified me.

I'm not aware of an organized climate strike here in Port-au-Prince today, but we've been out of school all week due to fuel strikes, and you know, those things are not unconnected. We're dependent on fossil fuels here on our island, and we have to import them all, and not only are they going to run out some day, but also burning them is causing damage to our planet. So many unsustainable situations! It's still not fully light yet as I'm writing these words, but people in other parts of the world are already marching, carrying signs reminding us that there is no Planet B.

I am going to write a requiem for the birds, but in the meantime I thought of this Hopkins poem, and the way it reminds us that grieving for loss of natural things is partly grieving for our own mortality.  I hope we can preserve something for the next generation, so that after we are gone, there will still be a beautiful planet for them to enjoy.

Spring and Fall
Gerard Manley Hopkins

to a young child

Márgaret, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's springs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

By the way, I missed Rebecca's post of a couple of weeks ago where she shared her Summer Poetry Swaps, including a poem I wrote about a sloth.

Linda is hosting the roundup today.

Poetry Friday: Things You Didn't Put on Your Résumé

This poem was on the Writer's Almanac this week.

Things You Didn't Put on Your Résumé
by Joyce Sutphen

How often you got up in the middle of the night
when one of your children had a bad dream,

and sometimes you woke because you thought
you heard a cry but they were all sleeping,

so you stood in the moonlight just listening 
to their breathing,

(Here's the rest.) 

We're so much more than our résumés. This poem is mostly about motherhood, and certainly there are many things about being a mother that I consider my greatest strengths. But even as a teacher, my résumé will never contain all my skills. Like the fact that I  once swallowed a fly, and went right on teaching.

I had some moments this week when I felt as though I was a great teacher. I had lots of moments when I felt the opposite, too, but I chose to focus on the good when I wrote this:

Things You Didn't Put on Your Résumé
by Ruth from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

How you love the characters in the Iliad
almost as much as the students in your class.

How happy it makes you when your students beg you
to read aloud one more chapter.

How many of your kids read their "first fat book" 
while they are in your care.

How you learn from reading their writing about soccer, and Fortnite,
and getting pointe shoes, and living their lives.

How you once swallowed a fly while you were teaching
and didn't even interrupt the lesson.


How about you? What skills do you have that aren't on your résumé?

Here's today's roundup. 

P.S. This week I found a photo of one of my poems on Facebook, posted by a friend who didn't know it was mine. The photo was from  this anthology, Imperfect: poems about mistakes: an anthology for middle schoolers, edited by our own Tabatha Yeatts. You should get a copy! 

Reading Update

Book #72 of 2019 was Birds of a Feather, the second Maisie Dobbs book, by Jacqueline Winspear. I'll probably continue reading this series. It's fun to see how many I still have left; thirteen, I believe.

Book #73 was Les Oiseaux d'Haiti, by René Durocher, a book of gorgeous photos of the birds on this island where I live.

Book #74 was The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, by Kim Michele Richardson. Set in Eastern Kentucky in 1930s, this book recounts the adventures of Cussy Mary Carter, a traveling librarian who also happens to be one of the Blue people. (She suffers from methemoglobinemia, which causes a blue skin color.)

Book #75 was Virgil Wander, by Leif Enger. While there were wonderful moments in this book, I didn't love it as I'd hoped I would.

Book #76 was Everything Inside, Edwidge Danticat's new book of short stories. I'm a bit of a completist when it comes to Danticat, whose characters and settings are so familiar to me, since they are all connected to Haiti in one way or another. This book doesn't disappoint.

Book #77 was Stronger than Death: How Annalena Tonelli Defied Terror and Tuberculosis in the Horn of Africa, by Rachel Pieh Jones. Highly recommended. Read my full review here.

Book #78 was Muse of Nightmares, by Laini Taylor. This is the second book in the Strange the Dreamer series. I read the first one in 2017. Taylor is just such a good storyteller. 

Book #79 was Grateful: The Subversive Power of Giving Thanks, by Diana Butler Bass. I liked this and found it thought-provoking; it went beyond the basics of the topic. Some will find it way too political, as it was written in the three months after the 2016 presidential election in the US.

Stronger than Death

I don't even remember when I first started reading Rachel Pieh Jones' blog, Djibouti Jones. I know it was a long time ago. I visited for her perspective on making a life in a place that could be challenging. I kept going back for her writing about sending her children to boarding school, her book recommendations, her meditations on fear and risk. And as she posted her (increasingly impressive) publications, I always clicked through and read what she had to say.

So it was natural that I would want to read her new book, Stronger than Death: How Annalena Tonelli Defied Terror and Tuberculosis in the Horn of Africa, coming out in October.

Rachel has been working on this labor of love for five years, so some glimpses have shown up in her blog. I knew of her interest in TB, in Italian, in all things Somalia.

Nonetheless, I was blown away by this book and by Annalena Tonelli. This is a complex, category-evading look at a woman most people have never heard of. That's how Annalena wanted it; she deliberately maintained a low profile in the service of her patients and her work. She put all her energy and efforts into loving and treating the people in front of her and raising money so that she could keep doing just that. "Annalena," writes Rachel, "followed the example of Jesus, who never spoke of results. She believed in the power of presence." She didn't waste her energy agonizing over metaphysics, either; "I learned to bend my head in front of the mystery of pain, suffering, and evil," she wrote. "I do not want to know why. I will not torment myself unnecessarily. There is no answer. It is the mystery hidden from the foundations of the earth."

Annalena had plenty of opportunity to witness pain, suffering, and evil, as she battled tuberculosis, hunger, bureaucracy, terrorists and criminals, all the way through to her death, which begins the book. Yet Rachel concludes, "I think Annalena made a choice, a conscious decision, to focus on joy and hope. Had she focused on sickness and death, she would have despaired....Annalena taped a list of the Wagalla dead [victims of a massacre] to the walls of her Merka room and said they often came to her in her dreams, one by one, during the night. But in the morning, when she woke before sunrise and sipped a cup of kawa, Somali coffee, she would look out the three windows of her room that opened onto the sea and watch boats bob and sway in the silvery-gray water. 'The sky is clearing,' she wrote. 'A new day. God is not yet tired of men.'"

Annalena's character comes through loud and clear in this story. She is an inspiring and radical role-model who deserves to be more widely known. The way she learned the names of her patients and all their family members, her meticulous record-keeping in clinical work, her mentoring of others, her ability to deny herself even to the point of hardly eating or sleeping, her sense of humor: all of these qualities, and more, resonate. Rachel herself clearly finds Annalena someone to learn from, and I loved the glimpses of Rachel searching for encouragement for her own journey. She marvels over Annalena's commitment and compares it to her own. She asks everyone she interviews why Annalena stayed in the difficult place she chose to work, and why the interviewee stayed, and how. "Some people," says Antonio, one person she talks to about Annalena, "feel a challenge when they see Annalena's life and then they can't do it. There can be complicated feelings." Rachel doesn't shy away from these complicated feelings, and to me her obvious connection with Annalena is one of the great strengths of this book.

"I trust in a resurrection," wrote Annalena. "I let every event settle and rest in the intimate presence of God." Reading about her makes me want to do the same.

Poetry Friday: Heart

This Rita Dove poem showed up on Facebook yesterday because she won this year's Wallace Stevens Award (congratulations!). I love the poem, and shared it here back in 2011. As I read it, I remembered that I wrote a poem about my heart recently, so here they both are, hers then mine.

Heart to Heart

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. Still,
I feel it inside
its cage sounding
a dull tattoo:
I want, I want --  

But I can't open it:
there's no key.
I can't wear it
on my sleeve,
or tell you from
the bottom of it
how I feel. Here,
it's all yours, now --
but you'll have
to take me,
too.

Rita Dove



My Heart
My own heart let me more have pity on - Hopkins

I woke with the same heart I had last night.
No transformation happened while I slept.
Same useless, softy heart that fell apart
Just yesterday (along with eyes that wept

And brain that’s still fixating on it all).
Why can’t I have a better, stronger heart?
A heart that chills, deals, moves on, gets a grip?
A lovely, sparkly, shiny work of art?

My own heart I just can’t have pity on;
Instead there’s the embarrassment and shame
I feel right now at all the ways I feel,
the feelings both without and with a name.

I am so sick of every bump and scar,
Oh heart, I am so tired of how you are!

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


This week's roundup is here.

Spiritual Journey First Thursday: Nudges

Our host Ramona invited us to reflect this month on the topic of "Nudges."

This has been a surprisingly difficult one. I think that it's a hard subject to put into words because it's so fuzzy. I probably make many of my daily decisions based on my intuition, but how much of that is a spiritual "nudge" from God and how much is my collected experience of life, and how much is just pure impulse in the moment? I can't easily break it down.

How interesting that I am often so quick to assign motives to other people, and to think I know exactly what they were thinking when they said or did a certain thing, when it is so challenging for me to unravel my own reasons for doing whatever I do!

I sometimes wonder how my life would be if some of those little nudges of the past hadn't happened. What if my parents had never met? What if my husband hadn't decided to transfer to the college where I was? What if he hadn't stopped by the college education department bulletin board to read about the schools advertising for teachers and to learn about the school in Haiti where our two children have had their entire education and where we have worked for more than twenty years now?

These nudges are mysterious, but I trust that God works through them and brings good.

Check out Ramona's blog to see what everyone else has to say on this subject.

Poetry Friday: Ode to Kool-Aid

I love this poem by Marcus Jackson because it brings back my childhood in a powerful way. I remember mixing up the Tupperware pitcher of Kool-Aid in various kitchens in various houses where we lived. The little cloud of color at the bottom of the plastic cylinder (and how different was my view of plastic back then, before the stuff was choking our planet), my "healthy" version of the recipe where I added only 3/4 cup of sugar instead of a full cup (see the word "unsweetened" on the package), the brightly-colored mustaches on myself and my brothers after our tumblers of Kool-Aid, consumed with a cookie or two.

Ode to Kool-Aid
Marcus Jackson

You turn the kitchen
tap's metallic stream
into tropical drink,
extra sugar whirlpooling
to the pitcher-bottom
like gypsum sand.
Purplesaurus Rex, Roarin'
Rock-A-Dile Red, Ice Blue
Island Twist, Sharkleberry Fin;
...
We need factory-crafted packets
unpronounceable ingredients,
a logo cute enough to hug,
a drink unnaturally sweet...

Here's the rest.

Kathryn Apel has the roundup this week.

What I Learned this Summer

I kept a file of things I was learning this summer; mostly it's links to articles I read and thought were good, or at least thought-provoking. I hope you, reader, find something to interest you here! As usual with these posts, some things I've been thinking about are presented in a fairly undigested way, but I'd welcome further conversation on anything here.

What does it mean to be a "real" mother? This is a lovely meditation on motherhood, infertility, adoption, and love in general. "I wonder about quantifying love, weighing belonging, measuring realness. By volume or heft or texture?....I thought love was a pie and I didn’t want to share my slice."

I learned a lot about birds this summer. I acquired some binoculars, with the help of my brother, an experienced birder, and he took me out a couple of times birding and taught me things. I also read about the healing effects of watching birds and started following this blog, Bird Therapy. More to come on this whole topic.

Speaking of healing, I loved this article on the first mass celebrated at Notre Dame after the fire.

This was a fascinating article on how hard it is to get rid of a piano.

Paul McCartney picks out his favorites of his late wife Linda's photos.

My husband and daughter took a bike trip this summer, and I was reminded both how large the United States really is, and that in spite of everything, the country is still full of good people.

I learned about this new online database of female artists.

This article is about the challenges of writing non-fiction about real people. Truth is slippery, and complex, and difficult to capture.

Did you catch the news this summer that kids were growing horns on their skulls? This is an article on why that's nonsense, and how to spot ridiculous studies.

This is a video on the effect of boarding school on small children. It was hard to watch, but it sparked some good conversations.

This one is about grief.

"The Life-Changing Magic of Making Do."

It turns out that, like so many things,  fireflies are disappearing, but this article has some ways you can help them come back.

I know it's technically still summer, but I'm back at school, so I am already in fall mode. You can expect another post on what I've learned at the end of September.

Poetry Friday: Honoring LBH

Today for Poetry Friday we are honoring the life of Lee Bennett Hopkins, a champion of poetry who died on August 8th. Hopkins produced over 120 anthologies of poetry during a long career.

We celebrated his birthday last year here at Poetry Friday, and here's the post I wrote then.

Jone MacCulloch suggested that we could best pay tribute to LBH by writing a poem inspired by and/or including a line from one of his.  I found "Why Poetry?" here, and borrowed his title and last line for my poem. (I also borrowed an Emily Dickinson line, while I was at it.  See it?)


Why Poetry?


Because some subjects
don’t work like math.

Because some objects
can’t be held in the hand.

Because some truths
have to be told slant.

Why poetry?

Because some surfaces
are shiny
and some are dull
and some things are invisible.

Because life doesn’t go on forever.

That’s why. 

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


Thank you, LBH, for all you did for children's poetry. You'll be missed.

Amy has today's roundup here. 

Poetry Friday: Prompts and a Tree

This poem seems appropriate for the first full week of school. It's gone well, but it's been exhausting, and that's even with Thursday being a national holiday here. This poem gets into the stakes, the human lives we're dealing with as teachers. It's worth the exhaustion. It's worth writing about.


Prompts (for High School Teachers Who Write Poetry)
by Dante Di Stefano

Write about walking into the building
as a new teacher. Write yourself hopeful.
Write a row of empty desks.

Here's the rest.



Today's theme for Poetry Friday is trees.

Tree
Jane Hirshfield

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Here's the rest.




I took this photo on our school campus this week. It is not a redwood, but it makes me think of the "immensity" in the last line of Hirshfield's poem. Trees and kids have that immensity in common.

Today's roundup is here.

Poetry Friday: Halfway

I had my thirtieth college reunion this summer, and it surprised me to find that all of us - in our fifties, an age twenty-two year old me would have considered staid and settled - were in transitions big and small. We're between our kids and our parents, between jobs, between relationships. We're still figuring things out. I've spent a lot of time lately between cultures, too, figuring out that dynamic as I've been doing since my birth. I still have things to learn.

I'm heading off to school today to begin my I've lost count how many year of teaching. I started as a teaching assistant in grad school that same summer I graduated from college, but babies have kept me home a few of the years between. It's been a lot of years, and while I'm infinitely more confident now than I was that first year, and I have infinitely more tricks up my sleeve, I know there are still new things to learn, new kids to teach, new discoveries to make.

I've loved this poem since I was a small child, and I taught it to my children, who love it too.

Halfway Down
A. A. Milne

Halfway down the stairs
is a stair
where I sit.
there isn't any
other stair
quite like
it.
I'm not at the bottom,
I'm not at the top;
so this is the stair
where
I always
stop.

Halfway up the stairs
Isn't up
And isn't down.
It isn't in the nursery,
It isn't in the town.
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head.
It isn't really
Anywhere!
It's somewhere else
Instead!

When I got home at the end of the summer, I had a package waiting for me from my friend Irene Latham. I had forgotten that Irene's cat had chosen me to receive this in a giveaway on her blog, so it was a nice surprise!

Molly has today's roundup.

Reading Update

Book #62 of 2019 was Michelle Obama's book Becoming. I also got to participate in a very fun discussion group about the book - unfortunately before I'd read it. It was taking forever for my name to work its way to the top of the holds list at the library, but finally I got it in the mail from a new friend! I enjoyed reading it immensely.

Book #63 was How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens, by Benedict Carey. This was for my summer professional development reading, and I found it interesting, counter-intuitive, and encouraging.

Book #64 was Master and Commander, by Patrick O'Brian. My brother couldn't stop raving about this series, so I decided to give it a try. The nautical terminology is way over my head, but my brother promised that if I just kept reading, soon that would become like background noise and I would be focusing on the main point of the stories, the relationships of the characters (always the part I like best about stories anyway). This seemed to be starting to happen. Now I'm ready to read the second book, but all I can find at the library is the audiobook, so I'm not sure I'll continue right away.

Books #65 and 69 were books I was reading aloud to my husband, and with some extra time over the summer we were able to finish both. The first was Beautiful Country Burn Again, by Ben Fountain, which is about the 2016 election, and the second was The Great Santini, by Pat Conroy. If I'd been reading the latter by myself, I would have given up early in the book. Although it is well-written (if somewhat floridly), I found the racism, misogyny, and abuse difficult to read about.

Book #66 was Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed, by Lori Gottlieb. I found this fascinating reading, both because of the individual stories involved and because of the insights into how therapy works.

Book #67 was The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel van der Kolk. I knew that this book was about trauma, but I was not expecting it to be as wide-ranging as it is. Particularly interesting was the section on shell shock/PTSD and the history of how the military has dealt with it. I appreciated the insights into how mind and body work together and how trauma affects people long-term. I also liked how research-based this was and how much hope there is for the future as professionals learn more and more about this topic.

Book #68 was The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley, the first book in a series about eleven year old Flavia de Luce. This was entertaining reading.

Book #70 was Maisie Dobbs, by Jacqueline Winspear. Maisie is a private investigator. The first novel in the series is set in 1929, and in it we learn about Maisie's current cases, but also about her past, and how she went from being a maid to a university student to a very clever investigator.

Speaking of clever, book #71 was extremely cleverly written. It was Elizabeth is Missing, by Emma Healey, and it's the story of Maud, who suffers from dementia. It's hard to know which aspects of the story she is imagining, and which ones are really happening. Is Elizabeth really missing? And what about Maud's sister Sukey?