Poetry

We're moving into poetry in the senior academic English class I'm teaching.  Poetry is one of those things that can seem a bit pretentious, especially to high school students.  We looked at contemporary lyric poems to begin with.  After some Practical Magic and other free verse I thought it might be time to take a swing at it ourselves.  I'm curious to see what students bring to class today.  Hopefully writing about something that interests them will remove that pretension and let them get some ideas on paper in the relatively unencumbered contemporary lyric format.

In My Pocket

あ and ん

alpha and omega

binary beginnings and silent ends.

ones and zeroes?

no,
math is an abstraction
but
certainty is in the machine.

waves relentlessly pound our shores,

pass through us

quantify us

connect us

ensnare us

constant attention demanded

by

this raging sea of yes and no,

profound and banal

personal collective

private crowd.

information constellations

in magnetic grips

lighter than a glance,

more certain than a second thought.

frozen moments of certainty

tumble to an event horizon

making sense of the senseless

at a ferocious rate.

I have a text!