Shared Loss

Homework:

Write a poem sharing at least 5 ideas to demonstrate the importance of sharing books and reading.

Share your poem by publishing it on a blog.

Assignment this week is poetry penning. Hope I'm not expected to rhyme or not work blue. Haiku, ode, shit-can wall-scribbling, found poetry walking down Canal Street “I’ll stab his ass in the dick.” 

Value, the First: Poetry Makes the: 1) Language of Three Maids Traveling as Mock Nuns down Filth of Post-Mardi Gras Concrete, & 2) Ill-Formed Letter to Prison Lover Recognizable as that-which-Brings-Us-Closer-to-The-Divine

Value the Fourth: Shared Reading Is Fun

Golden Boy Gary, former adman,           

now OK CEO, builds library in abandoned Ralph’s: retrofits maker space, plans community big reads & speed-read dating games.

Value, the Second: The Comfort of Knowing We’re Not Alone

The Millionth Poem to Debbie at 16, Part II

(Twenty Years in the Making)

Passing poetry in government green passageways

Hushed tip off she’s urinating in mandarin

Leslie knowingly nods.

An outsider who overhears, now looped in to Patrick’s paused pork.

I comfort my later cranberry-pissing pal with Sexton, Rich, Bishop

Plath. Those who have plodded our paths.

“All patinas convening”

Treads home to dysfunction

With Anne, Adrienne, Elizabeth,

Sylvia

Little Women

A house of uteri--house of falling father

Backyard burials

Now twice-baked memories at Santamas in San Diego with sisters, sons, sweets, sorrows.

Gal-gaggle gathered ‘round freshly toiled dirt

Digging into the chemical plant soil

Spades shoveling in low-rent hood

Houseful of daughters

A blessing.

Cursing Clifton, Edna St. Vincent Milay and committing Parker.

Two girls: Gleaming, penniless, not yet initiated, stomping, begging, bargaining, beaming. Borrowing solace in the bosom of Barrett Browning.

Value, the Third: We Better Learn that which We Teach Others in Rapid Succession

Down the street from my familial house of mild annoyance in University Acres lives Ava Leavell Haymon,

now state poet laureate—

who brought my BRMHS journalism peers and I to poems for two voices. guest instructor. 1992. 1993, Deb and I lead the poetry club, and bring in our girl and boy friends. 1994, President, I publish the first collection of Quill & Scroll club poems. President, I attend the flocking of Presidents, an outsider fly on the library windows overhearing the gluttonous narcissist principal crowing, “You people are the crème de la crème.” I blanche with distaste. Does the larded lady leader know that I’m here? Flutter back to my poets;

she’s croaked. She and a few others since.

French teacher falls against step after step of standardized muddle of marbling stairs, which, coincidentally, I envision everyday in English. Came back in cast. Nasty as plasterless again.

But, by the end, I am the crème de la crème.

Blame shared poetry, black market Brooks.

Burgeoning poets in ’94 who

could write by ’95.

Blame shared loss.

Value the Fifth: Sharing Reading Establishes Reading as Habit for Children

Electronic Reading: Emergent Literacy

“When is enough enough?”

“Never!”

The children’s librarians convene their mind-meld stabbing another plate slab despite dimming drives and overwhelming piles of electronically-unemptied edicts from higher ups.

“We’re teaching babies to read now? Will we be running story times in the womb next?”

Aloud in the darkened exam room in October 2013, I read you “Howl,”

 when you were still here.

Value the Sixth: Reading Aloud with Children Teaches Young People Proper Pronunciation

Value the Seventh: Reading Aloud with Children Assists in Learning to Contextualize Literary Content

Mother in her lavender, floral flannel nightgown gathers my sister and me, sixty pounds and fifty into her soft, ballet-as-exercise-not-obsession arms, leaned against the bunk backboard, reading glasses donned. It’s Louisa May Alcott, but I don’t mind, because I haven’t read Jack London, yet.