Do you know the photo of the dead Syrian child face down on the beach? How about that terminally-ill kid, do you know her? That boy who got shot down, what was he, twelve? What’s that floating in the river down there?
Looks like a body.
Huh, somebody should build a bridge.
And so their bodies are gone. Children die. Children die every day. It hurts. It aches. Wail, but it won’t go away. That pain will never go away. I don’t want it to. I want that pain to eat me up, envelope me, swallow me whole until I am that pain and then I learn to let my pain sing
Their bodies are gone, but their spirits remain, that is why the pain lingers
Celebrate their spirits, in fact, enliven them
Show us their dreams
Spell them out for us
Right here on our Bridge of Dreams
And so we are under construction, our Bridge of Dreams, 30,000 inch-and-a-half wooden cubes, locally cut and most hand-painted, each of them deliberately hand-set in its place on the bridge.
And so on that bridge, spelled out in these children's letter blocks, are these [gone] children's dreams.
Where did I find them?
In my own Heart of a Child, my own dreams,
Your gifts and dreams,
Spell them out on the bridge,
Let the world see your cry [Synesthesia anyone?]
on our Bridge of Dreams
What is our goal?
What is it we want to do?
Why are we doing this?
begin simply:
five hundred words
prose or poem
What touches your heart?
remember: Poetry is as much visual as it is linguistic, play with the fonts and
images, break the rules
at the same time, we have to deal with common core standards, they provide the structure and accountability we need to communicate our creativity to our audience effectively