Middle School Poetry Post Archive

Spring 2021 Middle School Poetry Posts

I Am

I am a mirror
Reflecting other people’s beauty
I never admire myself
I am an eel
Twisting, glimmering, spinning
Cut off from other fish
I am a chair
People use me to ward off lions
They put my life in danger to save
Their own
I am a house
One story, without even an attic
But instead with a basement to hide away my secrets
I am a broom
Cleaning up other people’s messes
Sweeping forever without a dustpan
I am a rainbow
Admired, colorful, happy, a symbol of joy
Yet made out of nothing but water and light.

--By Maisie Titterington, Grade 6, Lane County, Oregon

PARTNER POEM

Things

What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.
We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,
and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.
Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.

--By Lisel Mueller

ASK THE POEMS
Note: “metaphor” comes from the Greek word “metapherein”--meaning to transfer or change.—per Webster

1. What is your connection between solitude and creative energy? How is loneliness renamed? 2. What are you showing me about the nature of belonging in the world?3. What is your connection between freedom and the power to name oneself and other things? About finding similarities among different things?4. What other ordinary aspects of your world can become passages of safety through language?
5. What are other possibilities of hidden resources for belonging?

Pomegranates

I thought it would be easy
but it wasn’t. It was so loud
and all of the noise was noise
I didn’t understand. Everyone speeding past
me. And all I could do was watch
and listen. I sat on a swing and watched.

It wasn’t what I was used to:
no fields, no pine trees, no salty taste
in the air. Instead, dark roads of stone.
The streets were quiet, not like back home,
and old and smokey, too. Carvings showing
pomegranates, the fruit of Granada.

The Song

From somewhere
a calm musical note arrives.
You balance it on your tongue,
a single ripe grape,
till your whole body glistens.
In the space between breaths
you apply it to any wound
and the wound heals.

Soon the nights will lengthen,
you will lean into the year
humming like a saw.
You will fill the lamps with kerosene,
knowing somewhere a line breaks,
a city goes black,
people dig for candles in the bottom drawer.
You will be ready. You will use the song like a match.
It will fill your rooms
opening rooms of its own
so you sing, I did not know
my house was this large.

—By Naomi Shihab Nye, from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

ASK THE POEMS: Pomegranates and The Song

1. How is absence of connection through language like darkness?
2. How are you exploring ways that the world can be larger than expected?
3. In what ways are you using silence to convey connection with others?
4. How do you reveal the gift of being in an unfamiliar place; the gift of unexpected perspective?
5. How do you want me to experience the fruit of art?

Fall 2011 Poetry Posts

Doorways

She started out
walking through the small stretch of light,
collecting the brightest spots,
the glittering dust,
sweeping up cobwebs.

She moves to the darkness,
collecting the darkest shadows,
the deepest of black.
She lies on the floor to collect fallen tears.

She ends in an attic
she’s never seen
in front of a door
with claw marks on the edges.

She takes the light,
the dust from the dreams
and rubs them into the cracks.
She takes the shadows and sweeps them across
the door
like lifting a curtain.

She forms the tears and cobwebs into a key
and opens the door
that leads to all the words
she needs.

The Gathering Evening

Shadows are the patient apprentices of everything.
They follow what might be followed,

Sit with what will not move.
They take notes all day long--

We don’t pay attention, we don’t see
The dark writing of the pencil, the black notebook.

Sometimes, if you are watching carefully,
A shadow will move. You will turn to see

What has made it move, but nothing.
The shadows transcribe all night.

Transcription is their sleep.
We mistake night as a setting of the sun:

Night is all of them comparing notes,
So many gathering that their crowd

Makes darkness everything.
Patient, patient, quiet and still.

One day they will have learned it all.
One day they will step out, in front,

And we will follow them, be their shadows,
And work for our turn--

The centuries it takes
To learn what waiting has to teach

1. What unexpected qualities of darkness do you demonstrate?
2. In what ways does darkness lead to new openings, to illumination?
3. How does your point of view allow us to imagine ourselves as shadows? As dreamers?
4. How do you demonstrate the possibilities of transformation, a new perspective of the world, through patience? Through what actions and images?
5. What are you showing me about the power of gathering?

Spring 2011 Poetry Posts

On the Subject of Salvation

1. He held the ladder as she climbed,
a hammer stuck through the belt loop of her overalls,
bent nails clenched between her teeth.

3. When the footstool was too short
we lugged the self-supporting ladder across the lawn
and used an unbent wire hanger to snag the sun-touched fruit.

4. Rabbit is not so clever
that he can hide from Coyote in the moon
without using a ladder to get there.

5. Don’t walk under ladders; it’s bad luck.
It’s only bad luck
if you brush through the ghosts hanging from the rungs.

6. The celestial plumber only uses ladders
made of the finest spider thread
when he needs to unplug the stars.

7. Bird song
is the ladder that teaches
the soul to rise each morning,
despite the fog weighing it down.

PARTNER POEM

It Is Born

Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born, and everything is blue again like morning.

--Pablo Neruda (from Fully Empowered, tr. Alastair Reid)

ASK THE POEMS: On the Subject of Salvation and It Is Born
1. What are you showing me about the gift of being at the edge of an experience?
2. How does your sense of time and place invite me to think of your images in terms of dreams?
3. In what ways do your images explore the connection between desire and faith?
4. How do your words name new worlds, beginnings?
5. What are you showing me about the gift of seeking?

Varieties of Blue

A blue tear skims down her face,
in waterfalls, in oceans,
calming to my grandma’s quilt,
ruffling into the sky.
Falling back as little raindrops,
turning into snow.
Forming into bright, calm crystals,
merging into bluebirds.
Disappearing into bluebirds’ eggs,
crashing into petals blue.
Relaxing into a girl’s favorite tie,
reaching down her face.

--Ashley Babcock, Grade 6, Lane County, Oregon

PARTNER POEM

Improvisation (Eching)

In the drizzle
the tractor pulls
the sea-gulls
in its wake
along a wet, black field.
The furrows, pleats
opened by the plough,
catch the light like waves.
One by one, the birds sheer
off abruptly,
but return to their place
in the sky, held there
like children’s kites.

--Kevin Perryman (Bavaria), from This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from around the World, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye)

ASK THE POEMS: Varieties of Blue and Improvisation (Eching)
1. What are you showing about how something can feel true even if it’s not literally true?
2. How do your subjects change through unexpected associations?
3. What are you showing me about the possibilities of inventing a world through specific verbs?
4. How do you want me to notice the colors of your world?
5. What kinds of feelings do you convey through your images and metaphors?

Fall 2010 Poetry Posts

Color

Where I go

It’s colorful, rainbow

The lines are never straight

Always bent, or curved

Red trees

Orange flowers

Yellow grass

Green sheets

Blue pillows

Purple dishes

The edges aren’t blurred

They’re always in sharp relief

People can come

Once they accept who they are

Red shoes

Orange hair

Yellow nails

Green jacket

Blue jeans

Purple shirt

We cook food

We’ll all enjoy

In my rainbow kitchen

Red spices

Orange noodles

Yellow chicken

Green vegetables

Blue fruits

Purple rice

It’s a secret world

Where colors are cherished

--Maisie Titterington, Grade 6, Lane County, Oregon

PARTNER POEM

Lines

Draw a line. Write a line. There.

Stay in a line, hold the line, a glance

between the lines is fine but don’t

turn corners, cross, cut in, go over

or out, between two points of no

return’s a line of flight, between

two points of view’s a line of vision.

But a line of thought is rarely

straight, an open line’s no party

line, however fine your point.

A line of fire communicates, but drop

your weapons and drop your line,

consider the shortest distance from x

to y, let x be me, let y be you.

--Martha Collins, from the anthology Poetry 180: a Turning Back to Poetry, poems selected by Billy Collins

ASK THE POEMS: Color and Lines

1. What are you showing me about rules and freedom in poetry?

2. How do you want me to think about audience when I write my poems?

3. What makes a line of poetry blurry? What makes it clear?

4. In what ways are your images and metaphors invitations to the reader?

5. How do you want me to think about differences between things, people?

The river ran bright under the trees.

Under the longing trees ran a bright river.

Fish swam through the river overlooked by trees.

Trees watched stones skip through the bright river.

Shadows ran from the brightness in the river.

Sparkling brightness ran around the trees.

The trees ran with the water.

The bright water longed to be dark.

The river walked with brightness.

Trees dipped hands in brightness.

Fish jumped brightly from the water into trees.

Trees swam in the bright river.

Trees slowly drank from the water.

Decomposing trees ran through the bright water.

PARTNER POEM

Dream Cycle

In the dream I was asked to choose

between sky and earth, water and air.

The sky was wide and blue, warm each day,

the earth cool and dry, sweet-scented.

Between sky and earth, water and air

I could make no choice, loving them all.

The earth was cool and dry, sweet-scented.

Juniper and sage covered the hills.

I could make no choice, loving them all--

the creek ran clear like the beginning of the world,

juniper and sage covered the hills.

I wanted to breathe in every shimmering light.

The creek ran clear like the beginning of the world,

and a west wind bent the prairie grass.

I wanted to breathe in every shimmering light.

The whole world was fiercely alive--

and a west wind bent the prairie grass.

In high meadows, wild iris opened.

The whole world was fiercely alive!

Far above, an eagle was circling;

in high meadows, wild iris opened.

The sky was wide and blue, warm each day;

far above, an eagle was circling--

in the dream I was asked to choose.

--Janice Gould (from Deer Drink the Moon: Poems of Oregon, ed. Liz Nakazawa)

ASK THE POEMS: The River and Dream Cycle

1.What kinds of opposites live in you?

2.How do you define darkness?

3.How do the repetitions of words and phrases convey the movement of your images of water, plants, and animals?

4.How are you expressing the experience of time, and of timelessness? 5.How do your cycles of light and dark exist in my world?

I set the table with forks of happiness and knives of hurt.

With plates and glasses.

I filled the glasses with rays of sunlight.

I spooned rice of life onto the plate.

I spread a sauce of worry over the rice.

I poured worry soup into the soup bowl.

Cake of sadness was my dessert.

I sat in my chair and ate and I ate.

My sadness disappeared.

My worries disappeared.

My hurt disappeared.

My happiness disappeared.

And all that was left was a cup full of light.

–-Hannah Eshelman, Lane County, Oregon, Grade 6, Age 11

I am, O Anxious One.

I am, O Anxious One. Don’t you hear my voice surging forth with all my earthly feelings? They yearn so high that they have sprouted wings and whitely fly in circles around your face. My soul, dressed in silence, rises up and stands alone before you: can’t you see? Don’t you know that my prayer is growing ripe upon your vision, as upon a tree? If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream. But when you want to wake, I am your wish, and I grow strong with all magnificence and turn myself into a star’s vast silence above the strange and distant city, Time.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell

Ask the Poems: A Cup of Light and I am, O Anxious One.

1. Whom are you speaking to?

2. How do your feelings change?

3. What are you showing me about the beauty of disappearances?

4. How can a dream become a feast? 5. What are you showing me about silence, how it can be seen and felt?

I see a trash can

Sitting on the ground

I watch a top

Spin round and round

I write it down

I see dew

Roll off the grass

I watch lightning whip and flash

I write it down

I listen to the sounds of the city

I think of feelings

Joys and pity

I write it all down

For this is my pastime

It’s what I do lots

Because that’s

How I write

By harvesting thoughts

ASK THE POEMS, Harvesting Thoughts & Between Walls

1. Why are you paying attention to such ordinary things?

2. How can ordinary things become extraordinary if you look closely?

3. What kinds of things would you pay attention to at my house? At your own?

4. How do your choices of detail show feelings?

5. How is a place where nothing grows changed into a place full of possibility?

In the forest a little girl looked for her voice.

She looked for it slowly, holding every moment

sacred, singing muted in the breeze, calling for

her voice as she wandered on.

A small bluegrass held her voice, for he could

not sing or talk, but only a whisper of a voice

on the wind. As the girl searched, the sun set,

washing a shadow of doubt through the trees.

“I do not wish to use it, only to see it safe,

for who wants a voice which is muted by the

wind?”

In a lake the little girl looked for her voice, hiding

in a castle of mirrors, her voice a piece of

sand inside a dewdrop on a blade of bluegrass.

-–Helen Wolfram, Age 13, Lane County, Oregon

The little mute boy was looking for his voice.

(The king of the crickets had it).

In a drop of water

the little boy was looking for his voice.

I do not want it for speaking with:

I will make a ring of it

so that he may wear my silence

on his little finger.

In a drop of water

the little boy was looking for his voice.

(The captive voice, far away,

put on a cricket’s clothes).

-–by Federico Lorca, translated by W.S. Merwin

ASK THE POEMS

1. In what ways can a voice be found in silence?

2. What are you showing me about the voice’s disguises?

3. Can anyone own a voice?

4. What are you showing me about the need to search for a voice?

5. What gives a voice freedom?

Middle School Poetry Post Archive

Past Poetry Posts