Spent the day with the Oregon Writing Project at the annual Renewal Day. I always look forward to what kind of poetry or fiction or memoir will emerge. All writing is creative writing, isn't it?
In an exercise about writing about place, this arrived:
My focus was a classroom,
Another home for 30 years,
Behind carved desks, a wall of faces: Flannery O'Connor, Little Richard,
Roberto Clemente, Little Rascals,
Alice Walker, a devilish Steinbeck, Langston Hughes smiles down,
On Josephine Baker,
Lunch bags, Kleenex, scampering ants,
A discarded note,
Home to lockdowns, life choices, fishbowl discussions,
The quake of '89, the fire of '91, a place to cry for untimely death,
I am no longer the abandoned school building,
The grattified wall, or the secrets in the teacher's desk,
I became the river that springs from the side of a mountain,
With hand-painted trout, families of otters, and lightning to make
A fly rod tremble,
Today,
I see stoneflys and Blue Winged Olives hatch,
Like the child I was born in L.A. music clubs,
A hatchling crawling out of pop music and the Vietnam War,
Into the web of America's stolen treasure,
From an Ashgrove of legends-- I saw them all,
-Howlin' Wolf
-Big mama Thornton
-Son House
All, gone now, like the scene: played out,
But sometimes, I remember Sunday afternoons, when I'd wander in that club,
To find Taj Mahal, with his gospel/Jazz bloodlines,
Teaching the next generation.
In an exercise about writing about place, this arrived:
My focus was a classroom,
Another home for 30 years,
Behind carved desks, a wall of faces: Flannery O'Connor, Little Richard,
Roberto Clemente, Little Rascals,
Alice Walker, a devilish Steinbeck, Langston Hughes smiles down,
On Josephine Baker,
Lunch bags, Kleenex, scampering ants,
A discarded note,
Home to lockdowns, life choices, fishbowl discussions,
The quake of '89, the fire of '91, a place to cry for untimely death,
I am no longer the abandoned school building,
The grattified wall, or the secrets in the teacher's desk,
I became the river that springs from the side of a mountain,
With hand-painted trout, families of otters, and lightning to make
A fly rod tremble,
Today,
I see stoneflys and Blue Winged Olives hatch,
Like the child I was born in L.A. music clubs,
A hatchling crawling out of pop music and the Vietnam War,
Into the web of America's stolen treasure,
From an Ashgrove of legends-- I saw them all,
-Howlin' Wolf
-Big mama Thornton
-Son House
All, gone now, like the scene: played out,
But sometimes, I remember Sunday afternoons, when I'd wander in that club,
To find Taj Mahal, with his gospel/Jazz bloodlines,
Teaching the next generation.
Comments