It's good to be back, Poetry Friday! My hiatus was important, but I've missed you. Do you wonder what I've been up to? You can check out this post and the two following to find out what I did to relieve my mind. Shout out to Linda Baie for the initial gift and participation.
And while it has been ever so easy to forget, amid the wide array of challenges to our precarious status quo, that I'm supposed to be a Climate Activist, I'm going to send you to this separate post <currently under construction> all about the intriguing pandemic invention called a ShoeStrike for Climate.
[EDITED SAT MORNING] What was I thinking? School starts Monday, and even if I'm still rounding up new PreK families and trying to set up virtual home visits all week, I have a thousand things to do. I do not have time to write a separate post about shoestrikes! Climate action is still important, but I can only do so much. I may not get to everyone's post this weekend, but I'll get there eventually.
Also, I notice that I did something that bothers me when others do it. I took a shortcut and said "amid the wide array of challenges," instead of very specifically naming the unceasing traumatic effects--on every color of us--of systemic racism, the system that tells police officers that Jacob Blake (and his three little boys) are a threat to their safety because he's Black, so shoot him. Power, justice and compassion to the marchers yesterday. Sorry I couldn't join.
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Any minute now it will be September of the strangest and most uncomfortable of my 56 years. You can tell because I am awake at 12:30 am on Wednesday night writing a Poetry Friday post ahead of time.
In September 2001 the elementary school kids had already gone back to school and my Caterpillar Class of 4-year-olds was just getting underway. Then 4 planes crashed into parts of our "safe little greatest nation on earth" and suddenly nothing would ever be the same. Do you remember?
At that time I had a toddler and had recently returned to the practice of poetry. For a workshop I wrote this poem, and you'll see why it has come to mind again as I cease checking the daily counts in order to focus on going back to school, joyfully, with a screen full of 4-year-olds. I guess I have a little lingering grief to get out before we start singing the 🌞Good Day, PreK!🌞 song for 2020....
On that cheery note, HAPPY NEW SCHOOL YEAR to all the teachers who will or are already rockin the remote learnin! Kindly leave your links for the roundup below, and may we all be as well as we can-- especially our friends who have weathered hurricanes in addition to all the other storms we currently ride under.
