By Robert Hardy
There are three girls in Poetry Club. Tra’niyah, the third grader, walks around the classroom looking at everything through a magnifying glass—the leaves of the plants, the point of her pencil, her fingerprints—remarking on how different everything looks.
Delilah and Monserrat, the fourth graders, listen to me read Neruda’s poem about his socks, and laugh at the “two crusty firemen”—dos decrépitos bomberos—although they don’t really see how feet can be firemen. They both decide to write poems about their shoes. “You wear them on your feet,” Delilah writes.
Next they work on acrostics of their names. Monserrat begins with “Marvelis.” Delilah can’t think of a word for “I,” and Monserrat suggests Immigrant. Delilah shakes her head. Tra’niyah is still magnifying everything in sight. Now Monserrat writes ROB down the side of the paper.
“Role motel,” she writes.
I try to imagine my life as a role motel: checking in as a student, a husband, a father, a teacher, a poet—finding a vacancy as I wait for something new. I think of the road that brought me here, toward the end of the day, to this classroom where each child holds a glass to show me the world through wider eyes.
Monserrat has come down to the B. “Busy with poetry,” she writes.
Rob Hardy is the Poet Laureate of Northfield, Minnesota. His book Domestication: Collected Poems 1996-2016 was published in February.
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