Poetry month winds down

One of my favorite parts of teaching the second semester of the writing class sequence is teaching poetry to students who don't have positive experiences with it. It is a joy to awaken just a bit of appreciation for or connection with a poem whose meaning the students may previously have found elusive.  A student just turned in a great reader-response paper on Shirley Geok-lin Lim's "Riding into California."  Lim teaches at UC Santa Barbara, just a short trip up the 101 from us. Would love to have her come talk to class, but that will be pocketed for "someday."

"Riding into California"

If you come to a land with no ancestors
to bless you, you have to be your own 
ancestor. The veterans in the mobile home
park don't want to be there. It isn't easy.
Oil rigs litter the land like giant frozen birds.
Ghosts welcome us to a new life, and
an immigrant without home ghosts 
cannot believe the land is real. So you're
grateful for familiarity, and Bruce Lee
becomes your hero. Coming into Fullerton,
everyone waiting at the station is white. 
The good thing about being Chinese on Amtrak
is no one sits next to you. The bad thing is
you sit alone all the way to Irvine.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/foolingwithwords/main_lim.html

And here is a little sentimental poem I connected with as I was reading it the other day to my wee one. I read it from a Tasha Tudor book, First Poems of Childhood, that I received, according to the inscription, from my grandparents for my first birthday.

Baby

George Macdonald (1824–1905)

WHERE did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere into the here. Where did you get those eyes so blue? Out of the sky as I came through. What makes the light in them sparkle and spin?         5 Some of the starry spikes left in. Where did you get that little tear? I found it waiting when I got here. What makes your forehead so smooth and high? A soft hand strok’d it as I went by.         10 What makes your cheek like a warm white rose? I saw something better than any one knows. Whence that three-corner’d smile of bliss? Three angels gave me at once a kiss. Where did you get this pearly ear?         15 God spoke, and it came out to hear. Where did you get those arms and hands? Love made itself into bonds and bands. Feet, whence did you come, you darling things? From the same box as the cherubs’ wings.         20 How did they all just come to be you? God thought about me, and so I grew. But how did you come to us, you dear? God thought about you, and so I am here. http://www.bartleby.com/246/315.html