Day Four: The @CwpFairfield @writingproject Teacher Leadership Institute. We're Molding Writers & They're Molding Us.

Fortunate for us, yesterday two authors arrived to our summer programs to work with kids and teacher, helping us to think about voice and also to think about craft...we were lucky to have Sonya Huber and poet Jack Powers on campus to do writing workshops and to inspire our best work. There are few words to touch upon the magic of their presentations, but every year I try by participating with some poetry.

Sonya was at her best once again (well, so was Jack) filling up every crevice of white board she could find and she helped us to see how audience might stifle the voice of a beginning writer and how voicelessness is disempowering, so we should be building agency in voice as classroom educators. 

Meanwhile, Jack nodded good poetry with better poetry and called on the masses to make a parallel poem....everyone achieved. The work was exceptional.

Today, we have four more secret guests coming to work with our crews and it's humbling to see how it all comes together. In my "Holmstead Park" poem this year, I went after 2014, the first year Julie and I worked together as co-directors. 

Ruin. The Sun

 

It was 2014. Julie

wore a flowered skirt

with combat boots

and left in a Jeep

towards her home

in Shelton.

Trees were still green

and swaying like trickling

hourglasses along the highway. 

I was 41 then, learning to 

embrace cicadas and songs

of departing summer days.

Perhaps we both

thought about graduations,

the ways milestones get timed

with tossed tassels,

and dreadlocks turn to fades 

and twinsget first chin whiskers 

before they learn to shave.

I was just 41, then,

riding the tilt-a-whirl

fathers do, not knowing

if the ride would ever stop.

I wore Sauconys, 

throwbacks, a

wide-brim cap from

NYC that kept me

looking younger 

than I was.

Her ducklings

unnesting, too…

Broome County,

French horns…

…on the eve of 

adulthood.

So comes these Augusts,

and I still don't know 

how important these tymbals 

are to every song…

even if the car radios

have turned to silence.