First off, please excuse me not posting this earlier.
Downton Abbey was on and I’m a huge procrastinator.
By the use of my title, on might think this week I’m writing about the path I chose in life or being an outcast, etc. But, what I’m thankful for this week is, in fact, poetry.
At my school, I am part of the Creative Writing Club, which led me to an amazing experience that I am to be apart of called OC Ryse. OC Ryse is a slam-peotry contest for teens held at the OCSA school in Santa Ana. What you do is on the OCSA website they have a poem bank of these poems that you write a response to. Your response poem can relate to the original poem by rhythm, by storyline, by context, anything! It’s on March 7th and I am both unimaginably ecstatic and horribly nauseous. What happens for me is I get excited about doing things I feel passionate for but when it comes time for me to get up in front of a crowd and recite two poems I had to memorize, I will feel like I’m going to puke. Hopefully that doesn’t happen. If it does, it better go viral on YouTube.
For the past couple of weeks since the end of winter break, a small group of my fellow creative writers and I have been meeting after school to practice for this event. We’ve done small exercises, read poems we likes, share poems we wrote, and talked about the rules of the competition.
This past Friday, we spent our time exploring the poem bank and finding ones that we felt connected to or that we liked. The one I chose is called The Sun by Mary Oliver, which is so beautiful and I would explain why I related to it so well but it’s kinda personal and I don’t really want to share my personal information to the entire world.
We went around to each student in the group and they would read the poem they liked and then explain why they felt connected to it. One student read a poem called The Lanyard by Billy Collins, which I will type in the space below:
“The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano, from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly— a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them, but that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts, and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead, and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard. Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered, and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.”
Everyone in the group felt a connection to that poem. Everyone.
The thing about poetry is, it really brings us together. I had never realized that before.
Poetry says things that we can’t explain or that we’re too afraid to say. Like song lyrics, except your voice isn’t moving up and down.
After I got home from school, I spent my Friday night, Saturday, and part of Sunday binge watching Button Poetry on Youtube and watching different teen slam poetry events.
When I would listen to the audience, I could hear them snapping. I could hear them MMMing and AHHHing over beautiful words spilling of these peoples’ tongues.
And I just loved it.
I love how someone can make a lesson so powerful with just some imagery and a few metaphors. Its amazing. These people put their whole soul into telling you these important life lessons. Most of the lessons, for me, I had never had to learn or have never had anything of the sort happen to me. But the way these poets described a moment, an hour, a year, it felt like I had lived their life personally. It gave me a completely new perspective.
So this week, I tip my hat to poetry. For always saying the right thing when no words are able to leave my mouth.
xoxo,
Hannah
P.S: Yes, I wrote the poem that is the featured image. Yes, I know it’s kinda good. And yes, it is perfectly okay for me to be proud of it. Now read it
Shut Up And Be Grateful 