English 10
Chu
Same Song
By Pat Mora
While my sixteen-year-old son sleeps,
my twelve-year-old daughter
stumbles into the bathroom at six a.m.
plugs in the curling iron
squeezes into faded jeans
curls her hair carefully
strokes Aztec Blue shadow on her eyelids
smooths Frosted Mauve blusher on her cheeks
outlines her mouth in Neon Pink
peers into the mirror, mirror on the wall
frowns at her face, her eyes, her skin,
not fair.
At night this daughter
stumbles off to bed at nine
eyes half-shut while my son
jogs a mile in the cold dark
then lifts weights in the garage
curls and bench presses
expanding biceps, triceps, pectorals,
one-handed push-ups, one hundred sit-ups
peers into that mirror, mirror and frowns too.
Bailando1
By Pat Mora
I will remember you dancing,
spinning round and round
a young girl in Mexico,
your long, black hair free in the wind,
spinning round and round
a young woman at village dances
your long, blue dress swaying
to the beat of La Varsoviana,2
smiling into the eyes of your partners,
years later smiling into my eyes
when I’d reach up to dance with you,
my dear aunt, who years later
danced with my children,
you, white-haired but still young
waltzing on your ninetieth birthday,
more beautiful than the orchid
pinned on your shoulder,
1
2
Bailando: Spanish for “dancing”
La Varsoviana: a popular folk dance tune
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
tottering now when you walk
but saying to me, “Estoy bailando,”3
and laughing.
Eating Together
By Li-Young Lee
In the steamer is the trout
seasoned with slivers of ginger,
two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.
We shall eat it with rice for lunch,
brothers, sister, my mother who will
taste the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago. Then he lay down
to sleep like a snow-covered road
winding through pines older than him,
without any travelers, and lonely for no one.
Grape Sherbet
By Rita Dove
The Day? Memorial.
After the grill
Dad appears with his masterpiece –
swirled snow, gelled light.
We cheer. The recipe’s
a secret and he fights
a smile, his cap turned up
so the bib resembles a duck.
That morning we galloped
through the grassed-over mounds
and named each stone
for a lost milk tooth. Each dollop
of sherbet, later,
is a miracle,
like salt on a melon that makes it sweeter.
Everyone agrees – it’s wonderful!
It’s just how we imagined lavender
would taste. The diabetic grandmother
stares from the porch,
a torch
of pure refusal.
3
“Estoy bailando”: Spanish for “I am dancing.”
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
We thought no one was lying
there under our feet,
we thought it
was a joke. I’ve been trying
to remember the taste,
but it doesn’t exist.
Now I see why
you bothered,
father.
Miss rosie
By Lucille Clifton
when i watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when i watch you
in your old man’s shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week’s grocery
i say
when i watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up
“Miss rosie”
Literary Response and Analysis Questions
Directions:
Read the questions carefully. Respond to each thoroughly, insightfully and correctly in complete
sentences. Answers are worth two points each.
1. What details tell you how Miss Rosie looks now?
2. What details tell you how Miss Rosie used to look?
3. Which figure of speech in “miss rosie” do you think is the most powerful? What picture
of Miss Rosie does it create for you?
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
4. The idiom “i stand up,” used twice, gives the most important clue to how the writer wants
us to feel about Miss Rosie. What does standing up in the face of Miss Rosie’s
destruction mean? Why might the speaker be moved to “stand up” for Miss Rosie?
5. In a way, Miss Rosie seems to represent something more than herself, something never
named. What do you think she might symbolize?
Ex-Basketball Player
By John Updike
Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,
Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off
Before it has a chance to go two blocks,
At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage
Is on the corner facing west, and there,
Most days, you’ll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.
Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps –
Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,
Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.
One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes
An E and O. And one is squat, without
A head at all – more of a football type.
Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.
He was good: in fact, the best. In ‘46
He bucketed three hundred ninety points,
A county record still. The ball loved Flick.
I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty
In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.
He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,
Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,
As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,
But most of us remember anyway.
His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.
It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.
Off work, he hangs around Mae’s luncheonette.
Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,
Smokes thin cigars, and nurses lemon phosphates.
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods
Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers
Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.
Ode to My Socks
By Pablo Neruda
Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder’s hands,
two socks as soft
as rabbits.
I slipped my feet
into them
as though into
two
cases
knitted
with threads of
twilight
and goatskin.
Violent socks,
my feet were
two fish made
of wool,
two long sharks
sea-blue, shot
through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons:
my feet
were honored
in this way
by
these
heavenly
socks.
They were
so handsome
for the first time
my feet seemed to me
unacceptable
like two decrepit
firemen, firemen
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
unworthy
of that woven
fire,
of those glowing
socks.
Nevertheless
I resisted
the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere
as schoolboys
keep
fireflies,
as learned men
collect
sacred texts,
I resisted
the mad impulse
to put them
into a golden
cage
and each day give them
birdseed
and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers
in the jungle who hand
over the very rare
green deer
to the spit
and eat it
with remorse,
I stretched out
my feet
and pulled on
the magnificent
socks
and then my shoes.
The moral
of my ode is this:
beauty is twice
beauty
and what is good is doubly
good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
Chu
English 10
Chu
in winter.
Ode to Tomatoes
By Pablo Neruda
The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it's time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth, recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.
Ode to Los Raspados
By Gary Soto
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Papa says
They were
A shiny dime
When he was
Little
But for me
His daughter
With hair that swings
Like jump ropes
They’re free:
Papa drives a truck of helados and snow cones
The music of arrival
Playing block
After block
It’s summer now
The sun is bright
As a hot dime.
You need five
Shiny ones
For a snow cone:
Strawberry and root beer
Grape that stains
The mouth with laughter,
Orange that’s a tennis ball
Of snow
You could stab
With a red-striped straw
We have green lime
And dark-cola
And we have
An umbrella of five colors.
When the truck stops,
The kids come running.
Some barefoot,
Some in t-shirts
That end at the
Cyclone knot
Of belly buttons.
Some in swimming
Trunks and dripping
Water from a sprinkler
On a brown lawn.
I’m twelve going
On thirteen
And I know what’s what
When it comes to snow cones
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
Chu
English 10
Chu
Packed with the flat
Of a hand and laced
With a gurgle
Of surgary water
I know the rounds
Of the neighborhood
I know the kids
Gina and Ofelia
Juan and Amanda
Shorty and Sleepy
All running
With dimes pressed
To their palms,
Salted from play
Or mowing the lawn
The dime of sun
Pays them back
With laughter
And the juice runs
To their elbows
Sticky summer rain
That sweetens the streets.
I Am Offering This Poem
By Jimmy Santiago Baca
I am offering this poem to you,
since I have nothing else to give.
Keep it like a warm coat
when winter comes to cover you,
or like a pair of thick socks
the cold cannot bite through,
I love you,
I have nothing else to give you,
so it is a pot full of yellow corn
to warm your belly in winter,
it is a scarf for your head, to wear
over you hair, to tie up around your face,
I love you,
Keep it, treasure this as you would
if you were lost, needing direction,
in the wilderness life becomes when mature;
and in the corner of your drawer,
tucked away like a cabin or Hogan
in dense trees, come knocking,
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
and I will answer, give you directions,
and let you warm yourself by this fire,
rest by this fire, and make you feel safe,
I love you,
It’s all I have to give,
and all anyone needs to live,
and to go on living inside,
when the world outside
no longer cares if you live or die;
remember,
I love you.
Remember
By Joy Harjo
Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth,
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember that you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember that you are this universe and that this
universe is you.
Remember that all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember that language comes from this.
Remember the dance that language is, that life is.
Remember.
“Remember”
Literary Response and Analysis Questions
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
Directions:
Read the questions carefully. Respond to each thoroughly, insightfully and correctly in complete
sentences. Answers are worth two points each.
1. What single word, piled up throughout the poem, acts as a kind of refrain?
2. What elements of nature does the speaker personify – that is, in what way does she talk
about them as if they were human?
3. What metaphors does the speaker use to describe our skin, which comes in all colors; the
plants; animal life; and language itself?
4. What do you make of lines 19-22? Are these two statements logical? Do they sound true
to you?
5. What lines from the poem do you think are especially important in delivering the
speaker’s message?
6. How does the refrain contribute to the poem’s tone and message?
since feeling is first
By E.E. Cummings
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other:then
laugh,leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
and death i think is no parenthesis
Sea Fever
By John Masefield
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a gray mist on the sea’s face and a gray dawn breaking.
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume4, and the sea gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover.
And a quiet sleep and sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
The Legend
By Garret Hongo
In Chicago, it is snowing softly
and a man has just done his wash for the week.
He steps into the twilight of early evening,
carrying a wrinkled shopping bag
full of neatly folded clothes,
and, for a moment, enjoys
the feel of warm laundry and crinkled paper,
flannellike against his gloveless hands.
There a Rembrandt5 glow on his face,
a triangle of orange in the hollow of his cheek
as a last flash of sunset
blazes the storefronts and lit windows of the street.
4
5
spume: noun foam or froth
Rembrandt: Dutch painter (1606-1669), famous for his dramatic use of color and of light and shadow.
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
He is Asian, Thai or Vietnamese,
and very skinny, dressed as one of the poor
in rumpled suit pants and a plaid mackinaw,6
dingy and too large.
He negotiates the slick of ice
On the sidewalk by his car,
opens the Fairlane’s back door,
leans to place the laundry in,
and turns, for an instant,
toward the flurry of footsteps
and cries of pedestrians
as a boy – that’s all he was –
backs from the corner package store7
shooting a pistol, firing it,
once, at the dumbfounded man
who falls forward,
grabbing at his chest.
A few sounds escape from his mouth,
a babbling no one understands,
as people surround him
bewildered at his speech.
The noises he makes are nothing to them.
The boy has gone, lost
In the light array of foot traffic
dappling the snow with fresh prints.
Tonight, I read about Descartes’
grand courage to doubt everything
except his own miraculous existence8
and I feel so distinct
from the wounded man lying on the concrete
I am ashamed.
Let the night sky cover him as he dies,
Let the weaver girl cross the bridge of heaven
and take up his cold hands.
“The Legend”
Literary Response and Analysis Questions
6
mackinaw: noun short, double-breasted coat made of heavy woolen cloth, usually plaid
package store: retail store where alcohol is sold
8
Descartes’ grand courage to doubt everything: Rene Descartes (1596-1650), a French philosopher and
mathematician, attempted to explain the universe by reason alone. In his search for truth, he discarded all traditional
ideas and doubted everything. The one thing he could not doubt was the fact that he was doubting, which led him to
conclude, “I think; therefore I am” (in Latin, Cogito, ergo sum).
7
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
Directions:
Read the questions carefully. Respond to each thoroughly, insightfully and correctly in complete
sentences. Answers are worth two points each.
1. Describe the poem’s setting, or time and place.
2. In this poem an ordinary street scene is suddenly transformed by a tragic event. What
happens?
3. Why do you suppose the speaker in the poem says he feels ashamed? (Re-read lines 3843)
4. What images does Hongo use to help you feel as if you were an eyewitness to the setting,
the characters, and the event (lines 1-37)?
5. How would you describe the poem’s tone? In other words, what is the poet’s attitude
toward the event he’s made into a poem? List some of the details and words the poet
uses to create the tone.
Jazz Fantasia
By Carl Sandburg
Drum on your drums, batter on your banjoes,
sob on the long cool winding saxophones.
Go to it, O jazzmen.
Sling your knuckles on the bottom of the happy
tin pans, let your trombones ooze, and go hushahusha-hush with the slippery sand-paper.
Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome treetops, moan soft like
you wanted somebody terrible, cry like a racing car slipping away from a
motorcycle cop, bang-bang! you jazzmen, bang altogether drums, traps,
banjoes, horns, tin cans – make two people fight on the top of a stairway
and scratch each other’s eyes in a clinch tumbling down the stairs.
Can the rough stuff…now a Mississippi steamboat pushes up the night
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo…and the green lanterns calling to the high
soft stars…a red moon rides on the humps of the low river hills…
go to it, O jazzmen.
“Jazz Fantasia”
Literary Response and Analysis Questions
Directions:
Read the questions carefully. Respond to each thoroughly, insightfully and correctly in complete
sentences. Answers are worth two points each.
1. Point out the uses of onomatopoeia in the poem. What other sound effects can you
identify?
2. Why is the poem’s irregular rhythm appropriate? At what point in the poem does the
rhythm change?
3. Which images convey the roughness and power of jazz? Which images create an
altogether different mood?
4. Notice Sandburg’s use of vivid verbs throughout the poem. Why do you think he chose
these particular verbs?
5. Where does the poet use similes, metaphors, and personification to describe the jazzmen
and their music?
We Real Cool
The Pool Players.
Seven at The Golden Shovel.
By Gwendolyn Brooks
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
Die soon.
“We Real Cool”
Literary Response and Analysis Questions
Directions:
Read the questions carefully. Respond to each thoroughly, insightfully and correctly in complete
sentences. Answers are worth two points each.
1. Who is the we in this poem? What important facts do we learn about the speaker of
speakers of this poem?
2. What purpose do the two lines immediately below the title serve? What connotations, or
associations, do you have with the words golden and shovel?
3. What do you think is the poem’s theme, or message?
4. Where does the poet use alliteration? When you read the poem aloud, how does the
unusual repetition affect the sound of the poem?
5. Describe the poem’s unusual use of rhymes.
6. The poem’s meter, or patter of stressed and unstressed syllables, is extremely unusual. It
is clearly the work of a skilled poet. Scan the poem. What meter does Brooks use to
pound out her story?
7. How would you describe the poem’s tone, the poet’s attitude toward the characters and
subject? What words would you use to describe the speaker’s tone?
8. Brooks wrote “We Real Cool” in 1960 – more than forty years ago. Do you think the
poem is outdated or does it still apply to life today? Explain.
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
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.
Harlem
By Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore –
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over –
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
The Taxi
By Amy Lowell
When I go away from you
The World beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?
Simile
By N. Scott Momaday
What did we say to each other
that now we are as the deer
who walk in single file
with heads high
with ears forward
with eyes watchful
with hooves always placed on firm ground
in whose limbs there is latent flight
The Flying Cat
By Naomi Shihab Nye
Never, in all your career of worrying, did you imagine
what worries could occur concerning the flying cat.
You are traveling to a distant city.
The cat must travel in a small box with holes.
Will the baggage compartment be pressurized?
Will a soldier’s footlocker fall on the cat during take-off?
Will the cat freeze?
You ask these questions one by one, in different voices
over the phone. Sometimes you get an answer,
sometimes a click.
Now it’s affecting everything you do.
At dinner you feel nauseous, like you’re swallowing at twenty thousand feet.
In dreams you wave fish-heads, but the cat has grown propellers,
the cat is spinning out of sight!
Will he faint when the plane lands?
Is the baggage compartment soundproofed?
Will the cat go deaf?
“Ma’am, if the cabin weren’t pressurized, your cat would explode.”
And spoken in a droll impersonal tone, as if
the explosion of cats were another statistic!
Hugging the cat before departure, you realize again
the private language of pain. He purrs. He trusts you.
He knows little of planets or satellites,
black holes in space or the weightless rise of fear.
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
“Flying Cat”
Literary Response and Analysis Questions
Directions:
Read the questions carefully. Respond to each thoroughly, insightfully and correctly in complete
sentences. Answers are worth two points each.
1. What anxiety is the speaker sharing with you?
2. What horrible things does the speaker ask you to imagine in regard to her cat?
3. What does she ask you to realize about the cat at the end of the poem?
4. Explain what you think the speaker means by “the private language of pain” (23). What
significance do you see in the fact that she says she realizes that pain “again”?
5. Is this poem about more than the cat? How does the last stanza extend the meaning of the
poem?
6. Although this poem is written without rhyme or meter – it is written in free verse – it is
designed with care. What structural element do you notice immediately as you look at
the poem on the page? Provide examples.
Heart! We will forget him!
By Emily Dickinson
Heart! We will forget him!
You and I – tonight!
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
You may forget the warmth he gave –
I will forget the light!
When you have done, pray tell me
That I may straight begin!
Haste! lest while you’re lagging
I remember him!
Three Japanese Tankas
By Ono Komachi
1
Sent anonymously to a man who had passed in front of the screens of my room
Should the world of love
end in darkness,
without our glimpsing
that cloud-gap
where the moon’s light fills the sky?
2
Sent to a man who seemed to have changed his mind
Since my heart placed me
on board your drifting ship,
not one day has passed
that I haven’t been drenched
in cold waves.
3
Sent in a letter attached to a rice stalk with an empty seed husk
How sad that I hope
to see you even now,
after my life has emptied itself
like this stalk of grain
into the autumn wind.
“Heart! We will not forget him!” and Three Japanese Tankas
Literary Response and Analysis Questions
Directions:
Read each question carefully and then respond to each thoughtfully, correctly and completely.
Responses are worth two points each.
1. Who is the speaker of Dickinson’s poem, and whom is the speaker talking to?
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)
English 10
Chu
2. What does the speaker in Dickinson’s poem want to do?
3. Describe the situation of the speaker in each of the three tankas.
4. Dickinson personifies her heart by telling it to do things that only a person can do. What
does she tell her heart? How would you paraphrase what she means by “warmth” and
“light” (lines 3-4)?
5. Look back at the images and the figures of speech in the three tankas. What feelings do
they suggest to you?
6. How does the mood, or feeling, in Dickinson’s poem compare to the mood in Komachi’s
tankas?
7. All of these poems were written many years ago – the tankas are centuries old. Are they
dated? DO they still apply to people’s feelings and experiences today? Explain.
ELA Content Standard 3.7 (Narrative Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text)