Make a list

Make a list of the good things encountered yesterday,
and start to feel better.

A post-it note from a student passed on to me
like a love letter from a secret admirer

One of the activities:
Draw this image in 'Ars Poetica':
'For love
leaning grasses and two stars above the sea'
One of the boys made it into a space invasion scene,
which made me laugh.
Another boy made the grasses look like shark teeth,
how very wrong for the poem, but
a good tonic for me, sorry, Archibald MacLeish.

A quiet student at the back drew a moon and a star.
I had never considered that before,
so good to be taught something
when I was being paid to teach.

My drawing was of a steep slope that led to deep sea,
Two distant stars.
The grasses, a chaos of weeds.

Another favourite phrase: 'the night-entangled tree'
I asked them to imagine
horribly tangled hair, or a mess so bad that you might say to your friends:
'I am entangled! And then you lose your friends
because no one talks like that in real life.'

The laughter of young people is a very good thing
especially between 3 and 5 pm (they start school at 7 am),
when they could be home or playing soccer
but there they were with me at 'How to spend time with a poem.'

Playing a video clip of Auden's poem 'Funeral Blues'
and hearing the hush in the room of these 15-year-olds.
Their teacher telling me earlier on how much she likes 'Here Comes The Sun':
I needed to be reminded, especially yesterday,
that a gift from God years ago continues to be a gift,
I had forgotten and needed to be reminded;
such things should never be taken for granted.

Playing a clip of Cyril Wong reading
Telling the students this is a dear friend
my favourite Singapore poet
who deserves to be watched in person
I said, and also, he is very very very very naughty.
This much was clear from the second poem in the clip.
I read aloud his poem about his mother's steps to sanity.
If this poem were a colour, what would it be?
A student said grey, which was how I felt it to be too.
But grey not as a mist but as the cutting and healing that
only poetry can make
at the same time.

[After the class I was on the train
when a student from another context
sent me a photo of something her teacher had written
about 'Innocence', also a gift story,
where a Maths teacher, thoroughly fictitious,
appeared in my handwritten draft,
a voice of someone who had been abandoned,
so innocent, so muddled, so clear-headed and unbitter.]

(Image: kxngyuu]