If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

'If'' by Rudyard Kipling 

I chose this poem for poem of the day because it spoke virtue in the most concise form possible. 

The Park

The cicadas sing their evening ballad,

as the fiery red sun becomes nothing but a

 glow, behind the slowly swaying trees,

while the crickets sing the melody.

The bench is littered with cigarette butts.

the much too small jungle gym covered

 in graffiti and firecracker marks.

As the swings sway in tandem with the breeze

The sound of cars is constant,

and calming as dusk subtly evolves into night.

the fireflies come out,

putting on their nightly show.

I sit between the road and a forest,

Not knowing what side beacons me more.

Seemingly forced to make a choice,

But I am content to sit and admire both

Journal Response

Joyce Sutphens nature poems have some of her best work in them. The way she uses her line breaks much like another form of punctuation is always something that catches the eye first but her best skills lie in other areas. She is fantastic at describing and giving objects/specific things voices through a function they don’t have. Such as in Sutphes poem ‘How to listen’ where she writes, ”Listen with your eyes, as if the story you are hearing is happening right now.” Something about the idea of listening with your eyes gave that one stanza a lot of visual power and mental capability in imagining how to ‘truly listen.’ Another place she gives another meaning to something we take as literal. In her poem ‘crossroads’ she writes, “ The second half of my life will be ice breaking up on the river, rain soaking into the fields, a hand held out, a fire. And smoke going upward, always up.” In this stanza she seems to describe the end of the second part of her life which is death. The breaking of the ice on the river represents the final crack that allows death to seep in, but there was a more powerful line here. The line ‘and smoke going upward, always up’ gave a very strong mental image of the smoke almost representing what we imagine a spirit to look like rising into the heavens.

Ben Morris

Ellen Samuelson

Sela Patterson

Stupid things we did as children

At age 3

We put gum in our hair,

Ate ants,

And slammed our fingers in car doors

Then at age 5

We controlled our younger siblings,

Fed our dogs chocolate,

And gave our siblings stitches

But at 7

We ran away for thirty minutes at a time,

Ate all the Halloween candy at once,

And were pyromaniacs

At 11, the tween years

We cut our own hair,

Did back flips off swings,

And prank called 9-1-1

After that at age 13

We roller-bladed down huge hills,

Slammed the door when we were grounded

And tried to drive the car

Then at 15

We went pool hopping,

And ding dong ditching,

And almost set the house on fire

Now at 17

We speed on the highway,

Do as we please,

And hope the light stays yellow for one more second.

Realization

“We’re the land of the free and home of the brave”

Well 180 of 206 sovereign nations have freedom

And there is a fine line between bravery and ignorance

We used to be lead by great, fearless men

Who stood for what was right, not what they wanted

“What makes us number one?” many ask

We are no longer number one in this world

What we are in this world is

7^th in literacy

27^th in math

22^nd in science

49^th in life expectancy

178^th in infant mortality

3^rd in median household income

And 4^th in imports

What do you mean number one?

However, we are number one in

Number of incarcerated citizens per capita

And defense spending

We explored the universe

Made the greatest technological advances the world has seen

And we never used to boast about it

But now we can’t build a 35E bridge to get across town

We no longer have a war on poverty,
We have what feels like a war on the impoverished

We can no longer assume we are number one

We have to prove it.

                From the reading the very first paragraph and the second suggestion given on pg. 189 were the most helpful. The first paragraph talks about how we should be ‘afraid’ to edit in fear of losing that raw emotion. This is one of the reasons I don’t like editing poems, especially this one since it was on something we feel strongly about. It’s hard to write something you really like then come back and tear it apart and maybe even stray from your original idea to a better one. Then the second suggestion talks about how changing the lay out and structure on a poem. I did this almost as another form of punctuation. By isolating certain lines it makes them more punctual and forceful. It allows for your reader to see how you felt when writing the poem. It’s something I utilized in this poem and will continue to do as part of the revising process.