Reflective Practice

Kindness to Snails

For a Five-Year-Old
Fleur Adcock

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it.  You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.

The Poet's Occasional Alternative

by Grace Paley

I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead    it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft    a poem would have had some
distance to go    days and weeks and
much crumpled paper

the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among the small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor

everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it    many friends
will say    why in the world did you
make only one

this does not happen with poems

because of unreportable
sadnesses I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership    I do not
want to wait a week    a year    a
generation for the right
consumer to come along

For a Five Year Old

For a Five Year Old
Fleur Adcock

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.

Winter Digs

Winter Digs

Easter found us
but must have been confused
the timid miniscule green grass shoots
were blanketed in white.

What should have been
a capricious spring storm
rages still
one day later
and brings us comfortingly back inside
our cozy, well inhabited winter digs.

Poetry Reading in Unalaska

Poetry Reading in Unalaska

On a night the color of my winter pale skin
with my bespectacled, blossoming daughter at my side
after a day spent on empty words
in wind that smacked of a season nearly passed
in the last days of my thirty-first year
with a prematurely homesick heart

I listened to people braver than I
read poetry that belonged to them
either by right of the pen
or right of the heart

In a room I had visited so many times
to knit,
talk union politics,
eat Dr. Seuss's birthday cake,
hear a story,

I heard gorgeous words
that just yesterday I would have
had no time for,
let alone a whole Friday night.

Poem for Today: Translated by Knud Rasmussen

The great sea
Has sent me adrift
It moves me as the weed in a great river,
Earth and the great weather
Move me,
Have carried me away
And move my inward parts with joy.

This poem is from a book I found in our school library called Beyond the High Hills: A Book of Eskimo Poems.  The poem has no title.

Poem for Today: William Carlos Williams

This year my students and I have immersed ourselves in poetry.  I am still very intimidated by poetry, but at least now I know of more than one poet (Shel Sivlerstein, who is great, but not the only poet in the world, which is contraty to the belief of most elementary school students).  I love this poem by William Carlos Williams.  My students and I are trying to read a poem a day for National Poetry Month.

This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
Copyright © 1962 by William Carlos Williams