Poetic Medicine

One thought I came away with after conducting a poetry workshop with a Rio Linda summer school class today was, why are these students in summer school?
My daughter, Kara, who teaches these kids, invited me to facilitate a day-long poetry workshop with her. I have done this several times at the schools where she has taught, but never for summer school.
I mean, isn’t summer school for kids who flunked during the regular school year? These students were just too bright, too creative to have failed. And then I remembered the year I had to go to summer school — after 7th grade. That was a tough year for me. My stepmother seemed especially nasty, judgmental and mean spirited during that period in my life. My dad tried to be supportive but what he suggested one evening stunned me and probably traumatized me.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you took a gun to her,” he said as he sat at the kitchen table, expressionless. My stepmother had gotten angry with me that morning for some minor infraction. She took the sunny-side-up egg sitting on the plate in front of me and smeared the whole deal onto my face. It didn’t hurt, but what pissed me off was that some of the yolk dribbled down onto the new sports shirt I was wearing for the first time. I had bought it with money I earned setting pins at a neighborhood bowling alley.
My dad’s sobering suggestion sent my mind to the drawer in their bedroom, where I had found the German Luger he had brought home from the war. I did not entertain any thought of using it on her and I prided myself in that. I felt sorry for my dad. I carried the egg yolk and the gun story around with me in the coming weeks as I struggled through geography and math and English, where we were learning to diagram sentences.
So I failed seventh grade and I really didn’t care much at first. But then I realized that all of my friends would be moving on without me. I studied furiously at summer school and the teacher told me privately that I was the star of the class. She said she was so surprised that I had to be there.
When I think about the students at our poetry workshop — summer school kids — I know why they are there. I don’t know all of their stories, but I imagine at least some of them are worse than the one I lived through those many years ago.
I hope they continue to write compelling poetry as they did in class today. I hope they remember that I told them how writing poetry can be a healing process. I hope it works for all of them.

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