Tag Archives: poetry

Accepting This

Posted on January 26, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

When Kathy and I decided I would teach one more year, I wanted to make it the best year possible. I tired last year, was in physical pain, and it was difficult to be there for students as I wanted. I examined my life as Socrates suggested. I realized I focused on things I had little or no control over which is unlike me. I knew I wanted this year to be different and I worked hard the first 1/2 of the year in that respect. I remind myself I can only do what I am capable of doing. I stopped planning and organizing that which is not plannable or organizable and take a breath now and then. I choose to accept my life as it unfolds and as I author it in this moment. I owe this to the students and their families who support them and me.

Mark Nepo reminded me today of this as I read this beautiful poem.

Yes, it is true. I confess,
I have thought great thoughts,
and sung great songs—all of it
rehearsal for the majesty
of being held.

The dream is awakened
when thinking I love you
and life begins
when saying I love you
and joy moves like blood
when embracing others with love.

My efforts now turn
from trying to outrun suffering
to accepting love wherever
I can find it.

Stripped of causes and plans
and things to strive for,
I have discovered everything
I could need or ask for
is right here—
in flawed abundance.

We cannot eliminate hunger,
but we can feed each other.
We cannot eliminate loneliness,
but we can hold each other.
We cannot eliminate pain,
but we can live a life
of compassion.

Ultimately,
we are small living things
awakened in the stream,
not gods who carve out rivers.

Like human fish,
we are asked to experience
meaning in the life that moves
through the gill of our heart.

There is nothing to do
and nowhere to go.
Accepting this,
we can do everything
and go anywhere.

20 Comments

Posted in Education, Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged Accepting This, creativity, education, Mark Nepo, Mindful Practice, poetry, school, spirituality, teacher as transformer. Bookmark the permalink.

Shoulders

Posted on January 25, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

Yesterday, a student grumbled about not liking Math. I responded by saying I did not enjoy it either in school. She looked at me and asked me why I taught it. I explained I am not a Math teacher which elicited a comment about how good I was at it. It all reminded me of the adage: “We do not teach subjects. We teach children.” Or that is what I should do.

I looked for a poem that addressed this need to be a teacher of children. It is a calling. I think of the teachers I had who enjoyed being in the classroom and they carried each of us gently. Naomi Shihab Nye spoke about this lifting up of children and learners. I choose to be a learner with my students. I owe them being able to teach them Math even if I don’t enjoy it.

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

23 Comments

Posted in Education, Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged creativity, education, Mindful Practice, Naomi Shihab Nye, poetry, servant-leadership, Shoulders, teacher as transformer. Bookmark the permalink.

First Reader

Posted on January 23, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

We experienced a good day today. We are writing fractured fairy tales which are parodies of the originals. Students turn the story around and rewrite it with a twist. One student explained that the boy who cried wolf was visually impaired and was the victim of pranks by the sheep. Another student told the story of the Billy Goats Gruff through the eyes of the troll. Would you like it if someone were clacking around on your roof? The handsome prince dumps the beautiful princess for the maid in Rapunzel so someone did live happily ever after. The kids have fun with this activity and we talk about perspective. What if I were the Big Bad Wolf? We learn to understand that life is revealed through many eyes and experiences.

Billy Collins wrote this poem which I think expresses the way we learn and shape our learning. Occasionally, we need to let go, just be in the moment, and experience learning. I think we did that today.

I can see them standing politely on the wide pages
that I was still learning to turn,
Jane in a blue jumper, Dick with his crayon-brown hair,
playing with a ball or exploring the cosmos
of the backyard, unaware they are the first characters,
the boy and girl who begin fiction.

Beyond the simple illustrations of their neighborhood,
the other protagonists were waiting in a huddle:
frightening Heathcliff, frightened Pip, Nick Adams
carrying a fishing rod, Emma Bovary riding into Rouen.

But I would read about the perfect boy and his sister
even before I would read about Adam and Eve, garden and gate,
and before I heard the name Gutenberg, the type
of their simple talk was moving into my focusing eyes.

It was always Saturday and he and she
were always pointing at something and shouting,
“Look!” pointing at the dog, the bicycle, or at their father
as he pushed a hand mower over the lawn,
waving at aproned mother framed in the kitchen doorway,
pointing toward the sky, pointing at each other.

They wanted us to look but we had looked already
and seen the shaded lawn, the wagon, the postman.
We had seen the dog, walked, watered and fed the animal,
and now it was time to discover the infinite, clicking
permutations of the alphabet’s small and capital letters.
Alphabetical ourselves in the rows of classroom desks,
we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.

20 Comments

Posted in Education, Lesson Plans, Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged Billy Collins, creativity, education, First Reader, learning, poetry, school, teacher as transformer. Bookmark the permalink.

Blessings

Posted on January 22, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

The retreat was a welcome retreat. It was a time to be quiet and still find one’s voice. A theme which resonated throughout the weekend was a sense of being spiritually lost and what we should do when that happens. Part way through, I recalled an outdoor education class I took during my undergrad days. An expert outdoors man, Mors Kochanski, spoke to us about being physically lost and he gave us the same advice as I walked away with this past weekend. When you are lost, find a place to sit down and be quiet. Sometimes I know what I need to know and I only need to sit down and be quiet. The wisdom is there.

Ronald Wallace wrote this poem and it reminded me of blessings I take for granted and help me to find my way in life when I stop and am quiet. I can do all those things. I only have to stop and be quiet.

Occur.
Some days I find myself
putting my foot in
the same stream twice;
leading a horse to water
and making him drink.
I have a clue.
I can see the forest
for the trees.
All around me people
are making silk purses
out of sow’s ears,
getting blood from turnips,
building Rome in a day.
There’s a business
Like show business.
There’s something new
under the sun.
Some days misery
no longer loves company;
it puts itself out of its.
There’s rest for the weary.
There’s turning back.
There are guarantees.
I can be serious.
I can mean that.
You can quite
put your finger on it.

17 Comments

Posted in Humour, Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged Blessings, creativity, Mindful Practice, poetry, Ronald Wallace. Bookmark the permalink.

Where I’m Headed

Posted on January 20, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

It was an excellent first part to the retreat. We have a short session on Sunday, but already I feel replenished. I take prodigious notes at these events and do very little talking. I figure I talk enough in the classroom that this is a time to step back. I always have multiple notebooks on the go and the one I grabbed was quite well used. I glanced through it and found this from several months ago. It hibernated and is out for an early spring, I guess.

Where I’m headed

No planned routes

Markers do not set out a path

My GPS is non-digital.

This is adventure

Being lost has panache

A flair

It exhilarates.

I discover wonder

The I don’t knows fill life

They summon me

They make me whole.

4 Comments

Posted in Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments, Sabbath and tagged creativity, eloquent questions, Mindful Practice, poetry, spirituality, teacher as transformer, Where I'm Headed. Bookmark the permalink.

Replenish

Posted on January 19, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

I head to a retreat tonight and I hope that it replenishes my creative spirit. These are the lyrics to a song by Claudia Schmidt. The poem has a nature theme, but the idea of replenishing one’s self is strong, natural, and metaphoric in this case.

We go on, we go on,

Canoe under the hot sun,

The upturned paddles guide liquid to our

dry mouths.

Water within us, water surrounds us,

A great mystery our becoming dry at all.

Replenish, replenish, all must be replenished.

The water within and without.

All that fills, all that surrounds us:

The great whistling pines,

The tenacious beaver,

The ancient loon,

The rush of the young eagle’s wings as it

dips low over our canoe.

Replenish!

The eyes bathed in this delicate solitude,

The trembling eternity,

Called back in mid-sweep only to be

assessed by green parched eyes

Replenish!

Each shriveled heart

Which has its moments only at events set

aside for its song,

But cannot fly for the connection

Between the rock and the human body,

The heron’s wing and the hope in our souls,

We go on,

We go on.

Our paddles dance with the lake water to

the music in our throats.

We will grow dry again

Perhaps leap into the water

A small and symbolic celebration of a great

and endless task

Which gracefully undertaken,

Might allow us to go on, and on, and on.

15 Comments

Posted in Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged Claudia Schmidt, creativity, Mindful Practice, nature, poetry, Replenish, teacher as transformer. Bookmark the permalink.

Poem Against the First Grade

Posted on January 18, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

When I read this poem, I do so with care. George Venn wrote it in the voice of a six-year-old, but I can easily imagine anyone so excited about learning that they trip over their words and speak so fast words just run together. The poem reminded me of the way small children or a learner of any age, stops in mid-sentence and makes pronouncements in ways that do not always fit the conversation, but seem so right.

What a marvel when I do not worry about the need to be expert or proficient. I can just be in that moment a small child excited by the newness of my life.

Alex, my son, with backberry jam
smeared ear to ear and laughing,
rides his unbroken joy with words
so fast we let him get away
on the jamjar without clean cheeks first.

He spills frasasass
tea with milk and honey;
a red-chafted schlicker
beats our cottonwood drum.
Thumping the pano keys
like a mudpie chef,
he goes wild with words
at the wittle wooden
arms inside, a hundred
Pinoschios to singsong.
If he can’t wide byebye
bike to the candy store,
where he is Master Rich
with one penny, words turn
to tears in his mouf. Once
in a while, he walks home
with pum-pum-pumpernickel bread
his nose twitching so fast
a wabbit would love him.

Now this language is not taught in first grade.
Alicia, his tister, knows this fact.
But he juggles it around all day
until she makes him spit it out like
a catseye marble or a tack. “Ax,” she says,
“that’s not right.” She’s been among giants
who wipe off the dialect of backberry jam,
then pour hot wax on each bright mistake.

I hope for a bad seal on Ax and tister,
encourage the mold of joyous error
that proper sad giants, armed to the ears
with pencils and rules, all forgot.

12 Comments

Posted in Education, Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged creativity, education, George Venn, learning, Mindful Practice, Poem Against the First Grade, poetry, school, teacher as transformer. Bookmark the permalink.

Birdfoot’s Grandpa

Posted on January 16, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

A student read this poem today as part of their Language Arts and we discussed the underlying meaning of the poem. It reminded me of a story I heard several years ago. I am unsure whether the story is true, but the underlying idea is one teachers should consider.

A long-time teacher went and sat in a small park next to her school each day during lunch. One day a colleague asked why she spent every lunch break in the park quietly by herself. Her response was “I ask myself whether I want to go back and continue to do what I do. So far, the answer has always been yes.”

Joseph Bruchac’s wonderful poem reminded me of this story. Similar to the toads, each student we come in contact with has places to go to too. It is what should motivate us each day to return to the classrooms we teach in.

The old man
must have stopped our car
two dozen times to climb out
and gather into his hands
the small toads blinded
by our light and leaping,
live drops of rain.

The rain was falling,
a mist about his white hair
and I kept saying
you can’t save them all,
accept it, get back in
we’ve got places to go.

But, leathery hands full
of wet brown life,
knee deep in the summer
roadside grass,
he just smiled and said
they have places to go, too.

13 Comments

Posted in Education, Leadership, Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged Birdfoot's Grandpa, education, Joseph Bruchac, leadership, Mindful Practice, poetry, teacher as transformer. Bookmark the permalink.

Children Will Listen

Posted on January 15, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

I tell people when I facilitate workshops we do not teach human qualities, we model them. Good sportsmanship, integrity, and kindness, to name a few of those qualities, are prime examples. We seem to live in a world of “do as I say, not as I do”. Children are observant and intelligent and see through this so easily. They know when things do not add up and are inconsistent. In a world that changes so rapidly, adults need to be vigilant, authentic, and careful about the modeling they do.

Stephen Sondheim wrote this song for the musical, Into the Woods. I enjoy songs with deep meaning in the lyrics and this one is a prime example

How do you say to your child in the night?
Nothing’s all black, but then nothing’s all white
How do you say it will all be all right
When you know that it might not be true?
What do you do?

Careful the things you say
Children will listen
Careful the things you do
Children will see and learn
Children may not obey, but children will listen
Children will look to you for which way to turn
To learn what to be
Careful before you say “Listen to me”
Children will listen

Careful the wish you make
Wishes are children
Careful the path they take
Wishes come true, not free
Careful the spell you cast
Not just on children
Sometimes the spell may last
Past what you can see
And turn against you
Careful the tale you tell
That is the spell
Children will listen

How can you say to a child who’s in flight
“Don’t slip away and i won’t hold so tight”
What can you say that no matter how slight Won’t be misunderstood
What do you leave to your child when you’re dead?
Only whatever you put in it’s head
Things that you’re mother and father had said
Which were left to them too
Careful what you say
Children will listen
Careful you do it too
Children will see
And learn, oh guide them that step away
Children will glisten
Tamper with what is true
And children will turn
If just to be free
Careful before you say
“Listen to me”

29 Comments

Posted in Education, Leadership, Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged Children Will Listen, education, Educational Leadership, Into the Woods, leadership, Mindful Practice, poetry, school, Stephen Sondheim, teacher as transformer. Bookmark the permalink.

A Note

Posted on January 12, 2013 by ivonprefontaine

Well, I made it to the finish line this week and had a good day today. I ran out of steam after lunch, but afternoons have been kind this week. We are writing Fractured Fairy Tales and students get into this activity. I find opportunities to work 1-on-1 with students who need a little extra help. It is a great unit plan and can be modified for different ages.

Wislawa Szymborska wrote this poem. It fits with recent reflections about the extraordinary nature of ordinary life. My father-in-law, Bill, used to ask, “Who has more fun than people? More people do, of course!” I recalled his quirky, wise sayings as I read this poem. It is simple things, often overlooked, that give life its fullest meaning.

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it’s not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes;

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble on a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

and to keep on not knowing
something important.