Metra-Inspired Poetry

I'm currently taking a class called "Teaching Literature" and we're doing a unit on teaching poetry. This both fills me with dread and makes me very happy because I do not "get" poetry, and so I don't want to read it or study it, but I also know that I will someday have to teach poetry, and so I should learn to love it. Or at least gain a basic understanding so that I can teach it without making a fool of myself or teaching children incorrectly. Nothing worse than a bunch of teenagers who don't know how to write a proper haiku.

So, for this class, we're reading a book that is the faux journal of a faux poetry teacher. One of my assignments is to try out his assignments. So I did.

The assignment: Write a poem based on "Exercise in the Cemetery" by Jane Gentry

At dusk I walk up and down

among the rows of the dead.

What do the thoughts I think

have to do with another living being?

In the eastern sky, blue-green as a bird's egg,

a cloud with a neck like a goose

swims achingly toward the zenith.

First sentence should place you somewhere, the second sentence should ask a question and the third sentence should describe in images whatever you notice.

The only other time I've ever written poetry was during a particularly angst-y moment in my history. I think I was about thirteen and the resulting "poetry" is so humiliating, just thinking about it makes me want to run away and hide. However, I'm older and more mature now. I shouldn't ask students to do something that I wouldn't do. And, honestly, what is a blog for if not to completely humiliate yourself? And so... my poem. Written this morning and not yet revised.

Be kind.

Just as the sun gets going,

I read and ride the train towards Chicago

and my office.

Why is everyone else going?

The rhythm of the tracks

shift and shake the words.

They rattle on the page

like an old tea set on a platter

carried gingerly, careful not to spill.

Oh god. I think I'm dying. The shame. Seriously.