(T)reading their path

Here's a teaching-inspired poem from my untidy stack of writings. I hope you find it encouraging.

The View from the Front

I took the classroom clock down last week,

because the students and I could no longer

handle its incessant ticking.

Its thin second hand had become a brick,

repeatedly flinging itself at

our thick pane of silence.

But now, as the students focus

back on their books,

I peer over mine

to see what has caused such a stillness –

to find out what can possibly have happened

to bring twenty four teenagers to tranquility.

The flutter of a page, then another,

a clearing of the throat, a sniffle –

not much is happening here, or so it would seem.

But behind the spines clasped tightly

in the students’ hands,

a world is being rolled out

like a new carpet, cut perfectly to fit

into a bedroom full of light.

These kids may not often leave their bedrooms,

their home state, or their profile pages.

Their eyes now, though, have opened wide

to Alaska’s white wilderness,

and their bodies have felt the power

of the Ganges against them.

Each opening of a cover

shoves them forward into a village,

or a living room,

or a club car on a train railing toward Italy,

and they keep turning,

trailing behind the words on the page

that are beginning to look

like a line of ants hiking across a sidewalk

and on through a field,

then into a cavern where a low flame

throws a glow against the dusty walls.

To do list?

You know those times when you have a dozen things to do and some free time to actually get them done? That's when I look outside and see a poem sneaking by the window, reaching for the doorknob.

It's those times when I know I should be doing something that ultimately has little importance; that's when I find poetry to be a welcome excuse, a stealer of time for whom I conveniently leave the gate unlatched. Here’s my latest little thief.

The Breakup

In the grass under this bench

lies only the lead-tip end

of a broken pencil.

The eraser end is nowhere to be found.

What happened, I wonder,

to split such an indivisible pair?

Did an angry author force their divorce?

Or was it a mutual breakup?

Or perhaps, the lead had gotten sick

of its partner’s second guessing,

back-stepping behavior.

Maybe the lead had finally had enough.

I’ll bet it slammed the door

with its backpack slung across its shoulder

and set off to live a new life –

a life free of the eraser’s constant regret.

I’m sure that somewhere the eraser

is sitting alone, curled up on a wooly patchwork sofa,

longing for the company of its ex –

the pencil lead who is now bounding through

the tall blades of grass beneath this park bench.

Our Fiction in Wordles

I had my students paste the text of one of their stories into Wordle. Wordle is a web application that creates a word cloud of a passage, and the words that appear most often show up as the largest words on the word cloud. It helped them see which words they overuse in their fiction. Below are some samples.

Writing Exercise - Show Details

This is my sample of a writing exercise I used in my Creative Writing class. The challenge was to rewrite a "telling" scene into a "showing" scene. Enjoy!

The original telling scene: (The underlined parts are specific "telling" parts that need changed.)

It was late in the evening, and she could tell it would soon start raining. She was young – a teenager – and fairly wealthy. The street was starting to become wet. She had just finished a screaming match with her boyfriend. Their relationship was headed for the edge of a cliff after what she had done to him. He had told her that he deserved better than her, and she believed that he was right.

Rewritten to show:

The moon cast a silvery glow through the elms lining her neighbor’s drive. Searching for those patches of light on the gravel, Amy eased her way toward her dark house. Yard light off, parents almost certainly asleep, she breathed a sigh into the cool autumn air.  October was chilly in west Colorado, and it had a tendency some nights of letting a heavy, five-minute rain flush from the sky. A peal of thunder told her this was one of those nights. The paint of her tall, columned house seemed to glow under the flicking rain and moonlight, and its many windows blinked like eyes, accusing her with each flashing bolt.

A gentle step across the wooden porch. A soft turn of the key, a twist of the knob. Amy tried to keep her body’s movements silent, but her mind was reeling with noise.

“You’re unbelievable!” he’d shouted. “What were you thinking?” The air had been filled with cutting words, words of disgust and hate – words of truth.

Amy welcomed the sound of her bedroom door clicking shut. Her shaky fingers reached for her hair-tie and let her ponytail fall like damp curtains around her shoulders. Stepping in front of the mirror, she stared into the murky, brown pools of her eyes – the eyes of a liar. Beside her, the cutest smile in the world filled a frame. She lifted it from the dresser top and smiled back at it with one side of her mouth.

“Better,” she whispered into the still air of the room, moving to the edge of her bed. The sheets surrounded her head like a hood as she lay back. “You deserve better.”

She shivered and pressed the glass frame against her lips, then let it slip to her chest, which is where she would find it in the morning when she awoke with a dry, salty crust along her cheeks.