SCHONHAR 2013
TEACHER MODEL
“Ballad of Birmingham” by Dudley Randall
(On the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama,
1963)
“Mother dear, may I go downtown
Instead of out to play,
And march the streets of Birmingham
In a Freedom March today?”
“No, baby, no, you may not go,
For the dogs are fierce and wild,
And clubs and hoses, guns and jails
Aren’t good for a little child.”
“But, mother, I won’t be alone.
Other children will go with me,
And march the streets of Birmingham
To make our country free.”
“No, baby, no, you may not go,
For I fear those guns will fire.
But you may go to church instead
And sing in the children’s choir.”
She has combed and brushed her night-dark hair,
And bathed rose petal sweet,
And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands,
And white shoes on her feet.
The mother smiled to know her child
Was in the sacred place,
But that smile was the last smile
To come upon her face.
For when she heard the explosion,
Her eyes grew wet and wild.
She raced through the streets of Birmingham
Calling for her child.
She clawed through bits of glass and brick,
Then lifted out a shoe.
“O, here’s the shoe my baby wore,
But, baby, where are you?”
Dudley Randall, “Ballad of Birmingham” from Cities Burning.
Copyright © 1968
STUDENT OPTION #1
“Blackberry Picking” by Seamus Heaney
Late August, given heavy rain and sun for a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills we trekked and picked until the cans were full, until the tinkling bottom had been covered with green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered with thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush the fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair that all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/schools/11_16/poetry/growing_up.shtml
STUDENT OPTION #2
“Dreams” by Langston Hughes
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
Source: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16075

SCHONHAR 2013
STUDENT OPTION #3
“I wandered lonely as a cloud” by William Wordsworth
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Source: http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww260.html
STUDENT OPTION #4
“Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
Source: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20177
STUDENT OPTION #5
“Filling Station” by Elizabeth Bishop
Oh, but it is dirty!
--this little filling station, oil-soaked, oil-permeated to a disturbing, over-all black translucency.
Be careful with that match!
Father wears a dirty, oil-soaked monkey suit that cuts him under the arms, and several quick and saucy and greasy sons assist him
(it's a family filling station), all quite thoroughly dirty.
Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch behind the pumps, and on it a set of crushed and grease- impregnated wickerwork; on the wicker sofa a dirty dog, quite comfy.
Some comic books provide the only note of color-- of certain color. They lie upon a big dim doily draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside a big hirsute begonia.
Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch with marguerites, I think, and heavy with gray crochet.)
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant, or oils it, maybe. Somebody arranges the rows of cans so that they softly say:
ESSO--SO--SO--SO to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.
Source: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15215