A friend’s message becomes the doorway to a quiet meditation on care, grief, and the wish “may you be well.” Moving between poem and reflection, the post explores what poetry holds—tenderness, truth, repair—and why that kind of language matters in education, especially when we want children to feel fully human while they learn.
May you, Jon, be well
Little Mouse--sorry I broke your neck for eating my food--
may you be well
Anna, my precious daughter,
regardless of leaving your dinner dishes in your room,
and NOT getting ready to go to school this morning
and stealing my makeup on the way out the door,
may you be well
May all children be well
Did she realize this was a poem?
Her poem inspired my response to her
--interesting how poetry begets poetry--
and how poetic our deepest instincts are
As coal tortured by pressure becomes diamonds
our hearts become articulate under the strain of pain
and by the many lights of love
that explode us into awe
Hard to explain poetry in Darwin's survival terms
Easy to explain with the phrase:
God breathed life into Adam
Was Adam already lonely when God’s compassion
suggested that Adam give just one little rib
to gain the deeper respiration
of being in the presence of Eve’s smile,
her laughter,
and the promise of what might come after
And so, in morning breath,
when earth's sweetness has yet to be burned
by machines, mischief, and tyranny
we find the caterpillar of self-awakening
under a leaf that once inhaled sunlight to live
and now dies to grow into seeds and roots
and then know the divinity of trees
WHY POETRY MATTERS FOR EDUCATION
Poetry is the music of language
woven from the depth of experience
Poetry is language joined to breath
doing its deepest work
It is pain and joy refined and joined,
the pendulum of being
paused to drink deeply from inspiration’s pool.
Great narrative or prose steals cadence, meaning-making,
and word play from poetry’s artful tricks
POETRY FOR EARLY READERS
When initiating youngsters into the mysteries of literacy
chose poems to counterbalance the tedium of decodables.
It’s so easy to create structured phonics activities around poems.
Think of all the phonics activities available from these little poems:
Polliwog as you swim and swish
Do you wish to be a fish
Or looking up at a log
Do you wish to be a frog
OR
Duck!
I love how you duck
your head down
and pop your tail up, up, up
To make your pond into a cup