Poems Our Teachers Love
Many teachers sent in a favorite poem. Keep scrolling to see who loves what. Do you have a new favorite now?
Ms. Stuhr is a big Mary Oliver fan. This poem is called Wild Geese:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mrs. Robison loves Robert Frost's The Pasture:
I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.
I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.
Ms. Bartlett loves e.e. cummings' poem on Spring - how free form it is!
because it's
Spring
thingS
dare to do people
(& not
the other way
round) because it
's A
pril
Lives lead their own
persons(in
stead
of everybodyelse's)but
what's wholly
marvelous my
Darling
is that you &
i are more than you
& i(be
ca
us
e It's we)
From Ms. Hill comes a poem that a student gave to her during her first year at HMS:
Life always gives us
exactly the teacher we need
at every moment.
This includes every mosquito,
every misfortune,
every red light, every traffic jam,
every obnoxious supervisor (or employee),
every illness, every loss,
every moment of joy or depression,
every addiction,
every piece of garbage,
every breath.
Every moment is the Guru.
[by Joko Beck]
Mr. Corey loves this classic.
He's not the only one. Mr Hagerty does, too! Great minds....think alike:
(and Ms. Bartlett is related to this poet!)
Don't Quit
by
John Greenleaf Whittier
When things go wrong as they sometimes will,
When the road you're trudging seems all up hill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest if you must, but don't you quit.
Life is strange with its twists and turns
As every one of us sometimes learns
And many a failure comes about
When he might have won had he stuck it out;
Don't give up though the pace seems slow—
You may succeed with another blow.
Success is failure turned inside out—
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell just how close you are,
It may be near when it seems so far;
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit—
It's when things seem worst that you must not quit
Mr. Stiles loves this poem by Ken Nye: Wilderness Waterways
No matter where I find it,
clear water flowing over pristine sand and gravel
always stirs in me a longing for wilderness,
empty forests, dark and wonderfully forboding,
with small streams searching their way
from mountainside to ocean,
banks lined with green moss,
rocks covered with wet green growth
that make me pay attention to my step,
sunlight reaching the forest floor
only in sunbeams.
When I was a boy in New York
walking home from school
along Quaker Road,
a drainage ditch, lined with sand
and looking like a bubbling spring
in a Maine forest,
was, to me, the picture of vernal purity.
Never mind the paper cups here and there,
the orphaned hub cap and occasional Twinkie wrapper
caught in the current.
Even now, fifty years afterwards,
I can conjure a clear image
of that roadside drainage ditch
that called to me, like a siren.
As a man, when I roam the foothills
of the White Mountains of Maine,
I am conscious of
the sentinel silence of heavy woods,
broken occasionally by distant cries of crows,
and then by the soft, cheerful cadence
of water flowing from pool to pool,
a whispered serenade, played by the natural world.
Making their stepped journeys down stairways
built by glaciers,
along stream beds lined with white sand
and peppered with tiny water-logged pine cones,
these primitive vessels of nature’s life blood
create an almost inaudible music
for lovers of the forests’ wonders.
Coming upon a brook in the middle of wilderness,
I always wonder where it begins,
where it ends,
what I would find if I followed it
up or down.
A few times I have come upon the origin of
one of these pristine tendrils of purity,
a mid-forest swamp or marsh,
carpeted with skunk cabbage and marshweed,
an oasis of watery green in the dark understory.
Footprints here and there –
deer, moose, raccoons, coyote –
all drawing life from a watery nursery.
And, inevitably, I search at the edge of the
swamp for the outflow,
the beginning of another forest capillary
carrying life
and sustenance
to who-knows-where.
There is a mystery in a mountain stream.
Like gazing at a fire,
I am mesmerized by its simple beauty
and only feel the questions
whose answers are yet to be discovered.
Mr. Warshaw writes: This is an obscure poem thousands of years old. Sumerian culture.
The Seven
They are 7 in number, just 7
in the terrible depths they are 7
Bow down, in the sky they are 7
In the terrible depths, the dark houses
They swell, they grow tall
They are neither female nor male
They are a silence heavy with seastorms
They bear off no women their loins are empty of children
They are strangers to pity, compassion is far from them
They are deaf to men's prayers, entreaties can't reach them
They are horses that grow to great size that feed on mountains
They are the enemies of our friends
They feed on the gods
They tear up the highway they spread out over the roads
They are the faces of evil they are the faces of evil
Ms. Winslow loves this Shel Silverstein poem:
All the Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas
Layin' in the sun,
Talkin' 'bout the things
They woulda coulda shoulda done...
But those Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas
All ran away and hid
From one little Did.
Mrs. Reinsborough often reads Robert Louis Stevenson's The Swing with Matilda, her granddaughter. Here it is below:
The Swing
How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!
Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside—
Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown—
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!
Ms. Agell found it hard to pick a favorite poem but here is a new favorite by A.R. Ammons> it is called Rapids:
Fall's leaves are redder than
spring's flowers, have no pollen,
and also sometimes fly, as the wind
schools them out or down in shoals
or droves: though I
have not been here long, I can
look up at the sky at night and tell
how things are likely to go for
the next hundred million years:
the universe will probably not find
a way to vanish nor I
in all that time reappear.
Ms. Harder loves a beautiful poem by Pablo Neruda. It is very long. I could paste it hear (we have all the space in the world) but I will instead use a link as you may want to see more on poets.org.
So, Ode to My Socks! click HERE
Mrs. Kirwin had to memorize Gussie's Greasy Spoon in fifth grade. Fortunately, she loves it! It's by Jack Prelutsky.
You should see it below....
