As we approach our Fall Membership Meeting in conjunction with 100 Thousand Poets for Change, we can’t help but notice all of the poems that remind us of the work that we do as teaching artists.  Here is one…
You Begin by Margaret Atwood
You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye, that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever you like. This is yellow.
Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.
This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then the orange: the world burns.
Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.
This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.
It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will come back to, this is your hand.