From Blossom to Impossible Blossom

Last week was vacation. 

I expected to spend a great deal of time reading, but alas, other things got in the way.  Not that they were unpleasant in the least! Reading is a passion, but so are these things: learning, connecting and photographing. 

Here is a poem (April is National Poetry Month, after all) that captures how I spent most of my vacation as well as a slide show of a few of my photographs!



From Blossoms
~~Li-Young Lee
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted peaches.


From laden boughs, form hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.


O, to take what we love inside,
to carry it within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.


There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom
to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible dream.

Tread softly...I am dreaming...great dreams (on school vacation)

He Wishes For the Cloths Of Heaven

by William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Don't take it from me, take it from these two students...read this book.

Best thing I have heard thus far today? 

"Thank you for recommending Bloomability by Sharon Creech.  We loved it!"

My response?

Upload an image to VoiceThread and hand them my laptop...

here they are, telling why they loved it, unscripted and on the fly...

Love to Langston

Being April and National Poetry Month, I hoped to inspire my students with some poetry from Langston Hughes.I showed the students this stack of books:

I love to play the seven degrees of separation game in my library collection.  This is just the start of my Langston Hughes thread. 

I know I could keep going with other books for quite a while by following a thread to other poets, writers or the Harlem Renaissance.  There are also electronic resources that I could add to my thread, like the Children's Poetry Archive, where you can hear Langston Hughes read I, Too.

(For those of you that play seven degrees of separation with Kevin Bacon, I am three degrees away...or used to be, before his children graduated from the school my niece attended.)

Back to Langston!

Today I read Langston's Train Ride by Robert Burleigh.  I love this biography.  Written in the first person, Burleigh captures that moment when Langston realizes he is a writer and poet.  

I stopped reading the book just as Langston's poem appeared and cued up Langston talking about and reading The Negro Speaks of Rivers on the Poets.org Website. 

Cool Beans.  

Where to go next!

Explore My People with its glorious photographs by Charles R. Smith, Jr. and visit TeachingBooks.net to hear him talk about his photographs?


...or...


Explore Love to Langston by Tony Medina and have the students write their own Langston Hughes inspired poem...

Already I can feel that this school year is going to end far too soon and I will not have accomplished what I should nor spent enough time exploring what I would...


What to do with that stack of books in my arms?

I created 

this 

Ode to Langston Hughes

Book Spine Poem 

today

I

Langston Hughes

The Dream Keeper

II

Langston Hughes 

Visiting Langston 

African American Author and Poet

Pass It On 

My People

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Coming Home

I, Too, Sing America

Love to Langston

I love a rainy day!

April Rain Song
~~by Langston Hughes

Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.

Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.

The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night --

And I love the rain.

Here he is reading this poem.  

  
Rain creates one of nature’s best play things, the puddle.  

I have what I imagine is a fairly universal picture of my children dressed in rain boots and slickers (with the hoods up) and holding umbrellas running around in the small pond-sized puddle that would form at the bottom of the driveway during each rainstorm. What could be more fun?

So for those times, for this particular memory and for the ones to come.  An ode to rain:

Puddles left by rain

are my playground inviting

me to jump right in

I'll carry this poem in my pocket...

 or maybe this one...

One week after promising to post my students' work, I have finally carved out a few minutes to upload the pics to Animoto. For a task driven person, this has been a painful week.  :)

When last I wrote, my students and I had celebrated School Library Month and National Poetry Month by writing poems about school libraries for Poem in Your Pocket Day on April, 26th.  We are very excited about this day and hope you are as well!

Apologies for the blurry picture.

Which poem will you carry in your pocket on April 26, 2012? 

Okay, I may want to work on how to spell some words, but with sentiment like this, I'm willing to let it slide...

Here are a few Pocket Poems from my 3rd grade students:
 

A Book Spine Poem for April....showers

...and May flowers!

From a student today: