An Academic Prompted Poetry Day (#VerseLove26) so I Threw It Back to Syracuse When Abu and I Were First Introduced

For several years, I've enjoyed Jack Power's workshop on writing like a poet, where he uses Robert Gibb's poem, Homestead Park, to get kids thinking about trying out poetic characteristics from models and doing a variation on their own. In one of my notebooks, I sketched a poem about the first time meeting Abu, when he was a sophomore and I was a new doctoral student at Syracuse (the rest is history...so much of it his history). I chose to replay with that poem yesterday morning upon a prompt where a teacher turned scholar was writing her own way into the academy. 

Yesterday was back-to-back teaching and I think it all went well, although technology in the School of Nursing was not my friend (apparently no one's friend in that particular room). I made it work, though, with every teacher trickery I know how to do.

And it's pollen season so the back of my throat is raw. the dry drip of sinuses is about to take off to headache land, too. Ah, April in most of our United States.

I was proud of my students today in both sections of courses I taught and the way that the Middlebrook elementary students responded to the instruction. They were wonderful to work with and cracked me up as they taught my students the power of choral reading and its importance. Kids make it all worthwhile. 

Danané 

b.r.crandall

It’s 2008. This young man is

swallowed in an oversized flannel

and too-big-for-his-head

knitted winter toboggan.

We are being introduced.

Nottingham Bulldogs barking

in a hallway yelling adolescence,

overjoyed in cologne, Grippos,

and bottled sodas.

Because I’m 37, graying,

I notice his hands, brown, 

chapped by winter’s callousness,

fidgeting with a ballpoint pen.

He is telling me a war story,

bullets, scars on the inside of his leg.

A playful smile retreats behind 

the puckering of his lips.

I think about teaching. memories.

15 years of Kentucky bluegrass,

portfolios: there is no learning

without a relationship - wisdom from 

a mentoring friend. 

The flannel is grey and blue,

his sneakers are torn, but important,

from donations his family received.

A Syracuse sky is chalk.

When he tells me of his mother,

Makagbeh, and how she helped

his family survive, I retreat into 

shadows, privileges, the guilt

of a Western life…a cartoon.

At home, behind a keyboard

I write his memories as if they’re

my own, tapping his truth into 

a language I’ve never known.

And today, 20 years later,

Corinne’s prompt from a screen,

an April sun fighting spring frost,

I write with lovers of verse

across a nation, history

painting another story

of coming alive together.

Danané is a city in far-western Ivory Coast, located 

near the Liberian and Guinean borders in the Tonkpi 

Region, Montagnes District.