This year, May was gloomier than usual. Aside from a couple of blue-sky days, our typically beautiful Southern California May was thick and heavy, day after day draped in gray.
In the news, our school board chose a hedge fund manager to lead the district, public school teachers in Puerto Rico were being tear-gassed in the streets, and Chief of Staff John Kelly continued the current administration’s daily attack on immigrants.
In my eighth grade classroom, a distinct culture had developed. Students were challenging one another’s privilege and entitlement at every opportunity, which was important but exhausting, and I was begin to wonder if my students had learned anything in my class. My students were testing my nerves, and although we still had several weeks left, I was ready for the year to be over.
That was when I started to wade through the stacks of poetry collections each of my students submit for National Poetry Month. It took me a while to get started. Some kids cared very little about the project and that was clear in what they turned in, but every year I am also left in awe by the intimate experiences my students share and the exquisite hand-crafted publications they create. For several days, I poured over poems about families, and cats, and food. There were whole chapbooks about Fortnite, and depression, life and love. Some poems told serious stories or grappled with current events. Others assembled light collections of linked haiku or short, rhyming poems. But each group of poems spoke volumes about these particular young people at this precise moment in time and helped me see each of their unique and precious lives.
As I finished reading, the US relocated it’s Israeli Embassy to Jerusalem and in protests in Gaza, over 60 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire. Our school community sits in Westwood, just south of UCLA in an area nicknamed Little Tehran because of the many Iranian families who made their homes here. Our racial, socioeconomic, and religious diversity make our campus unique. There are students who fast for Ramadan, prepare for bar and bat mitzvahs, and attend catechism classes. I read articles about the most recent developments in the complex conflict in Gaza alongside poems by my diverse students who sit on both sides of this conflict, and wished Israelis and Palestinians could read one another’s poetry. It could show them their enemy’s heart and humanity and make it much more difficult to fire across that border.
Poems can provide intimate glimpses into the lives of others, and thankfully, according to recently released NEA research, poetry reading is on the rise. Although the gray of May still hung thick in the air and the headlines shifted away from the Middle East and toward the humanitarian refugee crisis at our own border, I found myself seeking hope in poetry. One of those poems was Yrsa Daley-Ward’s “Poetry” in which she writes, “You will come away bruised./ You will come away bruised/ but this will give you poetry.”
May was a bruise turned gray and cold, but from within all of the gloom, poetry brought out the human story. Poetry made me love my students again and see possibilities is the most problematic conflicts. As we wade through each tragic news cycle, keep pressing those keys. Keep reading each other’s words and writing your own. Keep sharing your work with the world. The world needs all of our stories, more than ever, to be a beacon through this dense fog.
Noriko Nakada edits the Breathe and Push column for Women Who Submit. She also writes, blogs, tweets, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. She is committed to writing thought-provoking creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Publications include two book-length memoirs: Through Eyes Like Mine and Overdue Apologies, and excerpts, essays, and poetry in Catapult, Meridian, Compose, Kartika, Hippocampus, The Rising Phoenix Review, and elsewhere.