This is Day 70 in Bahrain’s battle with the Coronavirus. We have gone from worried, yet energized, to bored and helpless, but always hanging on to hope.
The March Slice of Life on TwoWritingTeachers.org and April Ethical ELA #verselove poetry challenge sustained me and kept me focused during those first two months of quarantine.
In May, I am giving myself some new challenges:
- Finish my and my students’ project that was started in February–120 Al Raja School Stories. We interviewed and wrote stories about retired and present employees, students and alumni of our school. To finish off the 120 stories, they each wrote a story about themselves. So, now I have to do final editing touches.
- Write in my notebook–observations, poems, recipes, whatever. I would like to figure out how to use a notebook in a way that’s helpful to me as a writer. Usually I can’t find what I’m looking for when I want it. Does anyone have any writer’s notebook posts they have written to share your wisdom?
- Remember to post a Slice of Life each Tuesday.
Here is a Magic 9 poem I wrote this week. It was an interesting and new-for-me poetry form, with a play on the magic word–abracadabra. It uses a rhyme scheme of a-b-a-c-a-d-a-b-a, with nine lines and no other rules.
There is no magic in my poem, though. It is hard work needed to dismantle the white supremacy we have repeated ad nauseam since our country was colonized. Maybe our condemnation is that white people remember the past very well and work too hard to repeat it, clinging to their ill-gotten power.
Remember the Past
Quarantine poems giving me life,
Peace, hope and a place to dump
My sadness, brokenness and strife
Composing with #verselove
Gave me a boost, poetry rife
With hugs from teacher friends.
We must look back–opposite of Lot’s wife–
So we stop repeating the plague of trump.
We need surgery from a truthful scalpel knife.
