Request for poems

[stephantom.livejournal.com]

Hi, folks. I'd like to ask for some help, if I could. I'm a student teacher and I'm starting a unit on Monday... basically on the why behind this whole reading and writing thing. The need for communication, the power of written word to express one's perspective, experiences, identity, as well as to learn about other people's perspectives, experiences, etc... This is 7th grade, by the way. And the point is, I'm looking for poems that could be used to talk/think about how difficult it can be for people to really understand each other. People trying to understand each other, struggling, maybe failing...

I offer you one poem I've got so far:


A Single Slice Reveals Them
by Naomi Shihab Nye

An apple on the table

hides its seeds

so neatly

under seamless skin.


But we talk and talk and talk

to let somebody

in.

Comments

[catalania.livejournal.com]

'Dear Reader ' - Billy Collins

Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.

Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.

But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,
no room or manicured garden to enclose us,
no Zeitgeist marching in the background,
no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak.

Instead, our meeting is so brief and accidental,
unnoticed by the monocled eye of History,
you could be the man I held the door for
this morning at the bank or post office
or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.
You could be someone I passed on the street
or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car.

The sunlight flashes off your windshield,
and when I look up into the small, posted mirror,
I watch you diminish—my echo, my twin—
and vanish around a curve in this whip
of a road we can't help traveling together.




'The Quiet World' - Jeffrey McDaniel

In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond,
I know she's used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.


These two sprung to mind - perhaps not exactly what you were thinking of but I hope they help!

[wicked-sassy.livejournal.com]

I love "The Quiet World." Such a great poem.