How can I still be in a classroom, and still love teaching, even this year, you might ask? Well it isn’t necessarily due to anything particularly done by the greater public or certainly not all the ups and down of working around COVID protocols. There is just something that happens when, text in hand, I sit among readers and writers, and we talk complex characters or plot twists or even a last word, that just fuels me. We are in need of some hope, and whether plodding though Shakespeare’s Hamlet or being somewhat horrified by Shelley’s Frankenstein, or discovering the images and poetry generated during the short life of Basquiat, my student’s visions and imagery and words grant a faith in mankind I might not have found without them.
The Slap
After what seemed like the full-on advent of Spring we here in the Northeast were slapped hard by the return of frosty air and wind filled with snow. It was hard to take for sure when it hit us squarely across bared faces. I know I should have not fallen for the tease of ease, but I did, rather like an amateur in this region might have made. Quite similarly, I was swept up in the fanfare and glitter on Oscar night, the easy banter of those witty hosts, the hope that this year a more diverse and promising bank of recipients might hold their trophies high over head in pride. And they did. All of that. But the sting of that slap, that one violent recrimination captured by the ever present Eye, stings just as bad as the Arctic blast battering us back inside our homes. Back to wonder, how did we become a nation where shame is no longer felt when it is clearly earned?
Howl
Today
war is media filtered and heightened by the bots who channel through our clicks and likes
our preferences bring us straight into the bloody horror of what soldiers can’t erase
we feign surprise that civilian are targets despite the centuries of this standard practice since everyone made this their go-to wartime strategy like Hiroshima like London like…an endless list of those blown apart worlds and people haunt us through nighmares
but cynicism feels rough feels like the howling wind
raw
snowflakes blow about a few feet higher than me and I am transposed to wonder


