Summer moon over
mountains as white as the tip
of a fox’s tail
- Basho
In my mind, SELS hit another home run with teaching how to be a human.
I headed out to the campground at Donner Memorial State Park last week to meet up with Justine Minczeski's First Grade. She'd reached out to me to teach a poetry workshop to support the work her students have done on endangered animals. Our focus for poems and writing was on the animals the students chose to study: wolverines, bighorn sheep, gray
wolves, Sierra Nevada red fox, spotted owls and Lahontan Cutthroat trout.
"Did you bring a poem you wrote," asked one small student from beneath her pink backpack loaded with jacket, journal, and lunch. She looked up at me with such openness to discovery. I hadn't realized I'd be meeting an insistent audience eager for poetry. I opened on my phone a series of haiku I've written and read her one about a bat.
"Can I see?" asked two more. A third wandered over to the side and peered into my phone screen. Delightfully, all four children began reading together out loud the poem to the bat, chanting the haiku like a spell or a birthday song:
Hello bat, wings of skin
and
bearish ears, your shoulder shrug
is
nearly human.
- Karen Terrey
The night before, a Park Ranger led this class on a night hike and activities so that today each student wore a Junior Ranger Badge on their shirt. This is the kind of life-long relationship building with nature and stewardship that Federal funding cuts sabotage, decades into the future.
As we walked towards the lake, we listened and looked and sniffed around us in the park, pretending to be inside the body of whichever animal we wanted to be. One student wrote a poem about a tree they passed that held a hollow for an owl to live. Another wrote about the green water and what might lie beneath it for a trout. A third wrote about a funny moment the night before when a bat chased a mosquito too closely around an adult's head on their night walk.This poem below by Amy Lowell helped each student to introduce an unanswered question into their poems:
The Trout Amy Lowell
Naughty little
speckled trout,
Can't I coax you
to come out?
Is it such great
fun to play
In the water every
day?
Do you pull the
Naiads' hair
Hiding in the
lilies there?
Do you hunt for
fishes' eggs,
Or watch tadpoles
grow their legs?
Do the little
trouts have school
In some deep
sun-glinted pool,
And in recess play
at tag
Round that bed of
purple flag?
I have tried so
hard to catch you,
Hours and hours
I've sat to watch you;
But you never will
come out,
Naughty little
speckled trout!
How
old are you, Tree? What do you want, Fox? This was a technique that
helped them go deeper into their poems and understand that a poem can be
an "imagination conversation" with something other than yourself. A poem can become a call, an open-ended wondering. They practiced
making their imagination the first tool they picked up to write about these creatures
and their homes, places that are also our homes.
Did I mention yet the wonderful and caring attention the chaparoning parents gave these students, guiding them through inevitable challenging moments of hiking, camping, writing and working with others?
