rainy poetry lessons

Each week for the past three years I’ve had this sweet opportunity to teach a bunch of kids that I love a little bit about something else that I love – words.

Once upon a time, when I was a full time teacher in a different capacity, and I taught students at a traditional school, a fellow English teacher gave me this advice: Write when your students write.  Try to do the assignment you have given them.  

This little exercise helps to challenge me to be a better writer and it gives me a heap of sympathy at how difficult it can be to turn thoughts into words on a page at a teacher’s command.

A few weeks ago we wrote about spring.

This week we were inspired by all the rain we’ve been having.  We wrote poems about rain, about the music of rain, about becoming rain.  (If I remember, I’ll ask London if I can share hers here soon.  I really liked its cadence and flow.)

Sitting in my dear friend’s inviting living room, this is where that prompt lead me –

 

——————-

I am the rain

and the rain is me.

Spring rain

makes the green seem greener.

It’s kind of suffocating

and it’s kind of freeing

and I think it’s a gloriously messy sort of in between being.

There’s the welcome rain to wash away the sticky yellow pollen on the trees

and the sticky places in my heart.

There’s the dark days of rain that oppress and trap me inside the house

and inside my thoughts.

The same rain can carry me

and lose me,

can find me

and break me.

I am the rain

and the rain is me.