{"id":5697,"date":"2013-04-12T12:34:09","date_gmt":"2013-04-12T16:34:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/beginnersheart\/?p=5697"},"modified":"2013-04-12T12:34:09","modified_gmt":"2013-04-12T16:34:09","slug":"day-12-of-national-poetry-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beginnersheart\/2013\/04\/day-12-of-national-poetry-month.html","title":{"rendered":"day 12 of National Poetry Month ~"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I’m spending this week w\/ the most wonderful professionals in the world: teachers. Yep. Teachers.<\/p>\n

We get a bad rap these days.\u00a0 But nowhere will you find men & women more committed to the future of America: our kids. Who else will work 60+ hours a week (yes; they really do<\/em>) to make sure every child’s work is evaluated, and his or her abilities understood and considered in the next week’s lessons? Who else deals with body fluids, hormones, the results of negligent (to dangerously ignorant) parenting, the chaos of creativity, and the fall-out of both physical & emotional injuries? Who else cares so deeply they get cranky?<\/p>\n

So today’s poem is in honour of the many teachers I know, admire, and love. Here’s another favourite poet — Canadian Margaret Atwood — with her poem ‘You Begin’:<\/p>\n

\n

You Begin<\/strong>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

You begin this way:
\nthis is your hand,
\nthis is your eye,
\nthat is a fish, blue and flat
\non the paper, almost
\nthe shape of an eye.
\nThis is your mouth, this is an O
\nor a moon, whichever
\nyou like. This is yellow.<\/p>\n

Outside the window
\nis the rain, green
\nbecause it is summer, and beyond that
\nthe trees and then the world,
\nwhich is round and has only
\nthe colors of these nine crayons.<\/p>\n

This is the world, which is fuller
\nand more difficult to learn than I have said.
\nYou are right to smudge it that way
\nwith the red and then
\nthe orange: the world burns.<\/p>\n

Once you have learned these words
\nyou will learn that there are more
\nwords than you can ever learn.
\nThe word hand floats above your hand
\nlike a small cloud over a lake.
\nThe word hand anchors
\nyour hand to this table,
\nyour hand is a warm stone
\nI hold between two words.<\/p>\n

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
\nwhich is round but not flat and has more colors
\nthan we can see.<\/p>\n

It begins, it has an end,
\nthis is what you will
\ncome back to, this is your hand.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m spending this week w\/ the most wonderful professionals in the world: teachers. Yep. Teachers. We get a bad rap these days.\u00a0 But nowhere will you find men & women more committed to the future of America: our kids. 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Years spent living on the margins - in places with exotic names and food shortages - have left her with a visceral response to folks \u2018without,\u2019 as well as a desire to live her Buddhism in an engaged fashion. She\u2019s a writer and a teacher, the former director of a federal non-profit for teachers who write. She believes that if we talk to each other, we can learn to love each other (but she's still learning how). And she believes in tea. She is (still) working on her beginner's heart ~","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beginnersheart\/author\/brittongildersleeve"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beginnersheart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beginnersheart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beginnersheart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beginnersheart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/398"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beginnersheart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5697"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beginnersheart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5701,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beginnersheart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5697\/revisions\/5701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beginnersheart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beginnersheart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beginnersheart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}