It’s good to be back here with you on just Tuesdays this month! One of the posts I read last month, I am still remembering with fondness today. It was at Trish’s Jump Off; Find Wings. She wrote a letter to Jane Yolen. It was warm and personal, and it sent me right away to the library to check out the two books she mentions:
- The Devil’s Arithmetic, by Jane Yolen, a powerful Holocaust story that treats young people with the ability to handle truth, even when it is difficult.
- Attack of the Black Rectangles, by Amy Sarig King, a story of censorship of children’s books, including The Devil’s Arithmetic, “for the good of the children,” Jane Yolen makes a heroic appearance in this book defending freedom to read. Attack of the Black Rectangles is based in part on a true event that happened to the author’s own child.
Since I had just finished the books, for my #Verselove poem today I thought about writing about censorship. I first wrote out some coherent thoughts. Because the prompt was to write in a grammatically ungrammatical way, I thought I would try that later.
When we ban and censor books
our children come to the conclusion
that we are afraid of them,
that we don’t trust them.
We make book sales go up,
not because of their content
but because of interest
sparked in the banning
What if we let our children and youth
decide what to read
based on their interests?
Not ours.
Then I went to change it up, to write as our mentor Jennifer Guyor Jowett did–writing grammatically ungrammatically–turning nouns into verbs, modifying nouns with adverbs, and so forth. It was fun, and I think the product is much better than the thoughts I wrote out first. What do you think?
When we ginger
around delicating and timiding
our adolescents
and children
with afraidness and frailitude,
when we “don’t-read-that” them–
our hungry people young–
we lose and abuse them.
we disaster education
and failure
historying
noveling
poeming
storying
failing to represent their
sacred wholly wings
represented for flightfully
library wholeness
