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I've been making my seniors write, write, write. And since April is National Poetry Month, four of their remaining assignments are poems.
I know they love me. As a "mentor text" (fancy teacher word for "example"), I chose one of their assignments and wrote one of my own in class today. [It's really kind of terrifying to hook your computer up to the big screen and churn out an idea while the kids are watching/not watching/praying it's all over soon so they can graduate.] It's based off off of a poem found in the New Yorker and comes from THIS prompt. You should write one, too. Scribble it down on a piece of paper next to you. Tell a story about something you will one day love about yourself. Mine happens to be wrinkles. :) Someday I’ll Love Becky My momma gave me eye cream when I was 14. Said to slather it on my skin. Said it would prevent the wrinkles setting in. So I did. I slathered in on. For fifteen years, it nourished my skin. But the wrinkles still came. A frown line between my eyebrows, and wrinkles that stretched from my eyes – sort of like small spider legs stretching. Stretching. Stretching out. And then came the parenthesis around my lips. Like an added epitaph on a one-day tombstone. (This girl laughed.) (She laughed.) (Laughed.) And then I had a little boy and suddenly, the wrinkles and the eye cream didn’t matter. Suddenly, oh, so suddenly, the wrinkles were more like a story. A story that he was a part of. A story that he practically created. When I think about the thing that I’ll maybe one day love, I think it must be the wrinkles. Because how could you hate -- how could you really hate anything (and I do mean anything) that was created by living so well? xoxo, B. |
