One of my favorite CWI sessions is Poetry. It’s hardly hard core, just some messing around with language and images and making ourselves just a little more vulnerable on the page.
But that’s not the best part. The best part is listening to the groans and author disclaimers when we go around the room and share what we wrote in the 15 minutes or so I give them to write a poem.
Well, maybe the best part is the poems themselves. They’re great and it never ceases to amaze me the depth of emotion, perception and “seeing” our students have. Take a read for yourself:
The Earth as We Used to Know it
By: Rachel Fiedler
Good morning fair city of brick and steel,
enjoying your sunshine, synthetic or real.
Run barefoot and uphill, there’s not that much time.
Take deep breaths, and save them- I’m freezing all of mine.
Take a good look now, remember - record,
then file it all away, into a secret drawer.
This time bomb called beauty is silent and scared,
polluted with our sins, now we must get prepared.
For they will come find you, to bottle what is left,
of sunshine and green grass, and trade it for death.
Sto
Kristine Burdick
Bud Light was your drink
Purely a choice, a statement
same as your off-color jokes
defiant cigarettes
unfixed drawl
fixed teeth but with a great story.
A rental car in deep summer Florida
thick and brothy afternoon
you peeled a few twenties from your
front-pocket roll and
smiled crooked, told me to scram.
I protested, you insisted, a game
about surprise gifts and unnecessary
gestures.
I shopped while you
sipped a sour lemonade
and rested,
like a mistress, spending
your money like a favor, but bought something
practical, a sweater,
humorous, considering.
Your gaunt skin yellowed
and your clothes slipped,
food an obstacle,
a ravenous hunger everywhere but,
and you died the next spring.
The sweater doesn’t change, it’s always
striped, white buttons with red
stitches, but how I feel
about it does.
“Untitled”
Katie Reibert
his eyes
his sparkling eyes
his clear, sparkling eyes
his blue, clear, sparkling eyes
they look at me
they look at me and make me tremble
they look at me and make me tremble, from top to bottom, head to toe
i want him
i want to feel him
i want to feel him wrapped around me
i want to feel him wrapped around me, like a warm bathroom engulfing my body on a cold, winter’s day
i need a kiss
i need his kiss
i need his kiss on my lips
i need his kiss on my lips, feeling my lips, pressed against each other’s
i can’t
i can’t have him
i can’t have him now
i can’t have him now or ever
he is the forbidden fruit, i Eve
“untitled”
Kellie
Scratching, squeaking, clicking, twirling
Blank white paper, my mind whirling
A mindless abyss of form and thought
Until heart-barred feelings are cornered, caught
With bated breath and shaky hands
Life’s shared treasures begin to expand
My Sisters
Elissa Cahn
My sisters are warrior women,
Bare-breasted amazons under a starry Michigan sky.
A long dirt path leads me home to my center,
and for one week I am whole.
Music fills the spaces inside me
and I am full as the oak trees in the height of summer,
swollen as the waxing moon.
Tombstones
Will Fletcher
teeth are like tombstones. bone imposed in soil. gleaming ivory. sharp and bright when new. souls loved and remembered. soil has no reverence. sings no songs to heal. it only knows to grow. to lean forward into time. to make room. clean rows break formation. the wind’s whispering songs take slowly. sweetly chips away. the soil reclaims its due.
