Category Archives: love

Student Poem

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Little Magics

 

They loved pie, and the small
chew toy in the yard.
They loved the pat
and the emotional tug of a friend,
they loved run on sentences.
They loved the higgeldy piggeldy topsy-turvy
up and down over and out sound.
They looked at the glass
purred and ate.
They popcorned, gnawed, and
squeaked, and they loved it.
They hid, then scratched.
They hated that.
They loved helicopters
and screaming for no reason.
They loved skipping
the middle and going to the end.
They loved mixing and
not matching.
They enjoyed poems
They loved words
They loved and loved
every sound and feel of all the
little magics
They loved song
They smiled at Alexander
the Great, and they understood
every second.
They loved chicken
soup.
They loved me.
They loved random hum
like messy classrooms
and they loved sayings
and not endings.

 

Cameron was a fifth grader at View Ridge Elementary when he wrote “Little Magics.”  He worked with me through the Writers in the Schools program in Seattle.

Shann Ray

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BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH
I wonder if suicides aren’t in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life. Václav Havel

 

Are there any real questions
to be asked anymore?

Like the one you asked
when we walked

among blue spruce mountains
and saw a yellow butterfly

stumbling over the cattails
along the river.

Why does water sometimes pause
and seem to run against itself before going on?

Lord knows, we need
the light in these loyal mountains.

I won’t forget the night
you placed your hands on the back of my head.

I had my face in my arms but
I heard the absolute heaven
saying do not be afraid.

 

 

Shann Ray is a poet and prose writer whose work has appeared in Best New Poets, McSweeney’s, and Poetry International. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he is the winner of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize, the Subterrain Poetry Prize, and the Crab Creek Review Fiction Award. He is the author of American Masculine (Graywolf), and Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity (Rowman & Littlefield). He lives with his wife and three daughters in Spokane where he teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University.

Student Poem

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This is the poem

 

 

This person is Taylor, whose wacky noises and lip piercings
tell a story all its own.

This person is Tyler, who’s always there to put the broken pieces of shattered reality back together.

This person is April, who’s home to me, a mom, who’s always there for me.

This person is Dawson, whose jokes hold then shatter like the fiery explosions of the fourth.

This person is Corey, who’s due to be a dad, and who’s waiting for the day the water slides.

This person is Britney, who’s Corey’s first real love, and who is also waiting for the water to slide.

This person is Virginia, who’s quiet and shy, a little misunderstood. But, she is my best friend.

This person is Shanon, who’s outspoken, sometimes funny but a little pushy.

This person is Hay Hay, who’s always here at Marshall, and who’s always there to help bail me out of an NC in math class.

This person is Tabitha, who’s been a sister to me my whole life, but was never blood related.

This person is Anastasia, who’s Tabitha’s daughter, and who’s a little bit obsessed with littlest pet shop, and moshi monsters.

This person is Jaden, who’s Tabitha’s son, and who’s obsessed with video games just like his deadbeat of a dad.

This person is Cindy, who’s psycho, a compulsive liar, and a bad case to be Shanon’s mom.

This person is Ron, who’s always tried to hard to make everyone happy.

This person is Marge, whose love kept me happy as a child, but the only thing i have of hers, a necklace, only brings sorrow.

This person is Dee, who’s a second mother, and who shows that no matter what, you can power through any obstacle.

This person is Joe, whose heart is always in the right place.

This person is from my dream, who’s helped me look at the brighter side of things.

This person is Leroy, whose love for his workshop, wife, children, and grandchildren, like me, show us to cherish the time we have together, cuz life doesn’t last for eternity.

This person is My Father, who’s always haunting my dreams never stopping once to let me forget all he’s done to me.

This person is me, a girl who’s always searching for meaning in this world, like a single river looking to find a vast ocean.

 

 

Teah is an eighth grader at Thurgood Marshall Middle School, Olympia. Thank you, Teah.

Colleen J. McElroy

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Breaking Wild Horses

 

When romance walked in
there were too many fatal secrets
hiding in sheltered places.
We tried reining them in
corralling their savage cries
for attention – nothing seemed
to hold them at bay especially
as night broke the skyline
with the first signs of morning
and our guards were down —
our fences rattling with weakness
the whinny and stomping
of half remembered injuries
and families scabbed over.
We fussed with the images
trying to tidy them into civil
obedience – read how others
had calmed their unruliness
as they nuzzled soft places
left trails of rancid breath
flicked debris into the room (onto the table).
When romance moved on
the old nags came closer to the house
chewed on the lace curtains.
We couldn’t just put them down
not after they had been around
so long and carried so much baggage.
So we groomed them
trotted them out for prizes
boasted about their origins —
how difficult it had been to finally
keep them away from our comings
and goings – herded them into a far field
where their passing might go unnoticed
where even weeds bloomed in colors.

 

By permission of the author.  © Copyright 2012.

 

Colleen J. McElroy lives in Seattle, Washington where she is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, and served as Editor-in-chief of the Seattle Review from 1995-2006. McElroy’s collection of poems include most recently, Sleeping with the Moon (2007), for which she received a 2008 PEN/Oakland National Literary Award. Her latest collections of creative non-fiction include: A Long Way From St. Louie (travel memoirs), and Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar (finalist in the 2000 PEN USA Research-based Creative Nonfiction category). Winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award, she also has received two Fulbright Fellowships, two NEA Fellowships, a DuPont Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Fellowship. Her work has been translated into Russian, Italian, Arabic, Greek, French, German, Malay, and Serbo-Croatian. McElroy’s ninth collection of poetry, Here I Throw Down My Heart, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2012.