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McConkey’s Poetry Class

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Before I Die..... I want to: skydive. I want to: be in a movie. I want to: see the grand canyon. I want to: see a world cup game. I want to: get married on Barbatos. I want to: Be in a movie I want to: be famous. I want to: meet johnny craig. I want to: have a happy family.

Dreams 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

by, Langston Hughes = “A Voice” =

by Pat Mora
Even the lights on the stage unrelenting as the desert sun couldn't hide the other students, their eyes also unrelenting, students who spoke English every night

as they ate their meat, potatoes, gravy. Not you. In your house that smelled like rose powder, you spoke Spanish formal as your father, the judge without a courtroom

in the country he floated to in the dark on a flatbed truck. He walked slow as a hot river down the narrow hall of your house. You never dared to race past him,

to say, “Please move,” in the language you learned effortlessly, as you learned to run, the language forbidden at home, though your mother said you learned it to fight with the neighbors.

You liked winning with words. You liked writing speeches about patriotism and democracy. You liked all the faces looking at you, all those eyes. “How did I do it?” you ask me now. “How did I do it

when my parents didn’t understand? The family story says your voice is the voice of an aunt in Mexico, spunky as a peacock Family stories sing of what lives in the blood.

You told me only once about the time you went to the state capitol, your family proud as if you'd been named governor. But when you looked around, the only Mexican in the auditorium,

you wanted to hide from those strange faces. Their eyes were pinpricks, and you faked hoarseness. You, who are never at a loss for words, felt your breath stick in your throat

like an ice-cube. “I can't,” you whispered. “I can't.” Yet you did. Not that day but years later. You taught the four of us to speak up. This is America, Mom. The undo-able is done

in the next generation. Your breath moves through the family like the wind moves through the trees. ~ ~ ~ ~ Poet and storyteller Pat Mora is a native of El Paso, Texas, where her Mexican grandparents settled during the Mexican Revolution (1911-1920).

** Uncoiling **
Pat Mora

With thorns, she scratches on my window, tosses her hair dark with rain, snares lightning, cholla*,hawks, butterfly swarms in the tangles.

She sighs clouds, head thrown back, eyes closed, roars and rivers leap, boulders retreat like crabs into themselves.

She spews gusts and thunder, spooks pale women who scurry to lock doors, windows when her tumbleweed skirt starts its spin.

They sing lace lullabies so their children won’t hear her uncoiling through her lips, howling leaves off trees, flesh off bones, until she becomes

sound, spins herself to sleep, sand stinging her ankles, whirring into her raw skin like stars

*cholla(cho'ya)n.-spiny cactus found in the southwestern US & Mexico

=Summer=

Sweat is what you got days.
- Walter Dean Myers From Brown Angels: An Album of Pictures and Verse The Eagle He clasps the crag with crooked hands;Close to the sun in lonely lands,Ringed with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

By: Alfred Tennyson, Lord Tennyson =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. =Analysis of Baseball=

BY [|MAY SWENSON]

the ball, the bat, and the mitt. Ball hits bat, or it hits mitt. Bat doesn’t hit ball, bat meets it. Ball bounces off bat, flies air, or thuds ground (dud) or it fits mitt.
 * it's about

Bat waits for ball to mate. Ball hates to take bat’s bait. Ball flirts, bat’s late, don’t keep the date. Ball goes in (thwack) to mitt, and goes out (thwack) back to mitt. ||< Ball fits mitt, but not all the time. Sometimes ball gets hit (pow) when bat meets it, and sails to a place where mitt has to quit in disgrace. That’s about the bases loaded, about 40,000 fans exploded.

It’s about the ball, the bat, the mitt, the bases and the fans. It’s done on a diamond, and for fun. It’s about home, and it’s about run. ||

Sonnet on Love XIII by Jean de Sponde "Give me a place to stand," Archimedes said,

"and I can move the world." Paradoxical, clever,

his remark which first explained the use of the lever

was an academic joke. But if that dead sage could return to life, he would find a clear

demonstration of his idea, which is not

pure theory after all. That putative spot

exists in the love I feel for you, my dear. What could be more immovable or stronger?

What becomes more and more secure, the longer

it is battered by inconstancy and the stress we find in our lives? Here is that fine fixed point

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Georgia,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.125em;">from which to move a world that is out of joint,

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Georgia,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 1.125em;">as he could have done, had he known a love like this. //Translated by David R. Slavitt// **Hope is the thing with feathers** By: Emily Dickinson Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune--without the words,

And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm. I've heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

==The man who sold his lawn to standard oil Joked with his neighbors come to watch the show While the bulldozers, drunk with gasoline, Tested the virtue of the soil Under the branchy sky 5 By overthowing first the privet-row. Forsythia-forays and hydrangea-raids Were but preliminaries to a war Against the great-grandfathers of the town, So freshly lopped and maimed. 10 They struck and struck again, And with each elm a century went down. All day the hireling engines charged the trees, Subverting them by hacking underground In grub-dominions, where dark summer’s mole==

==But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.==