Water-Striding

"All children are water-striders. We skate along the top skin of the pond each day, always threatening to break through, sink, vanish beyond recall, into ourselves."
--Ray Bradbury, "I Sing the Body Electric"

Having spent the last month and a half working with urban middle and high school students this turn of phrase caught me. Too often the children I encounter skim the surface only momentarily, allowing me to glimpse who they really are for brief moments. What lies below the surface for these youths is far darker than the adolescent angst of my own childhood. For these kids it is nothing too remarkable to ruin a shirt soaking up the blood of a friend beaten half to death after school, and yet, like any eighth grader, they still manage brief moments of skating.

poem: who the meek are not

the following came to my attention through my wife through a friend who sends daily poems throughout poetry month:

"Who the Meek Are Not"
by Mary Karr

Not the bristle-bearded Igors bent
under burlap sacks, not peasants knee-deep
in the rice paddy muck,
nor the serfs whose quarter-moon sickles
make the wheat fall in aves
they don't get to eat. My friend the Franciscan
nun says we misread
that word meek in the Bible verse that blesses them.
To understand the meek
(she says) picture a great stallion at full gallop
in a meadow, who -
at his master's voice - seizes up to a stunned
but instant halt.
So with the strain of holding that great power
in check, the muscles
along the arched neck keep eddying,
and only the velvet ears
prick forward, awaiting the next order.