Besides Shel Silverstein and a few Robert Louis Stevenson poems in childhood, my first introduction to poetry was my junior year of high school when our English teacher Mr. Allison read Gary Soto’s Oranges.
Before that afternoon I had a vague understanding that poetry used the word Thou often and from a Little Rascals short I had once watched of Alfalfa reciting of Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, I understood poetry to have a mysterious rhythm that I did not quite understand.
Mr. Allison told us a little about Gary Soto before he read the poem. Soto was currently living and about the same age as our parents. In fact, he was a brown man like most of our parents and grew up in the very neighborhoods up north some of them had.
When Mr. Allison read the poem, it did not have the rhythm that seemed undecipherable to me but told story, clean and clear. The story was about young love between a boy and a girl not much younger than us. And when Mr. Allison was nearly finished with the poem, when he got to these next lines,
I didn’t say anything.
I took the nickel from
My pocket, then an orange,
And set them quickly on
The counter. When I looked up,
The lady’s eyes met mine,
And held them, knowing
Very well what it was all
About.
Mr. Allison’s voice cracked. His eyes filled with tears as he struggled to read the lines in this section.
My classmates looked around at each other. A few could not look up from their own printout copy, not wanting to shame our teacher in his emotion. A few snickered into their shirt collars. But most of us just sat awestruck. Was our teacher really getting emotional about a poem?
He was not one to cry often. He was a good teacher. He always had control of the classroom, of each of us and himself.
But that day in 5th period he was overcome with a tenderness that made us all look at that poem again. What power did it hold to make this grown man cry? It took hold of our attention. And we turned poetry over a little more carefully in our minds.
I was his assistant the following year, my senior year. When he came to the poetry curriculum he again teared up reading that poem. Our younger siblings told us the same and it became an inside joke but also testament to the power of poetry.
It has been decades since that afternoon my junior year and I think about it often. It came up again when my own children noticed I cannot read Brad Aaron Modlin’s poem “What You Missed That Day You Were Absent From Fourth Grade” without my voice cracking and needing to take a second before each line.
And yet…this next month I was asked to teach a short 1 hour class to high schoolers on poetry and these are the very two poems I will bring to the day. Both tell stories from a child’s perspective. Both poems are stripped of pretense or any sort of artifice. Both poems illustrate that poetry is not scary but have the power to stir hearts….even ours.
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This week I was able to talk about joy in birds and parenting with
on her podcast A Thing With Feathers. I hope you will listen and enjoy.I pay a portion of my student loans and an honorarium to our guest writers with the paid subscriptions on this Substack. As the new year began I lost many subscribers as the payment information was not up to date. Sadly this lost of income means I can no longer pay our guest writers. If you enjoy this Substack consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can continue to make both these payments. Currently about 30% of my work is unpaid often with a promise of “exposure.” Artists should be paid for their work. I’d like to be able to do that. With three more paid subscriptions I can pay our guest writers. With ten more, my monthly student loan payment will be much more manageable. A monthly subscription is the price of a fancy Starbucks coffee. Have one with us.
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I never understood or liked poetry much either. As a student, as an adult, even as a parent of a son who absolutely loved and regularly was moved to tears over his poetry books he’d bring home from class! Christian even wrote his own compilation of poems and all I ever thought was, “I don’t get it!” lol! Shemaiah, you make every kind of literature, writing, etc sound amazing and worth my time! I’ll certainly be checking these ones out mentioned here! Thank you again, for expanding my mind in another direction🙃💕