The children’s poetry community lost a friend and a mentor when Lee Bennett Hopkins died on August 8th. I never had the pleasure of meeting him, but in everything I’ve read about him, he was a gentle leader and proud father of poetry.
Among his many anthologies, I have Amazing Places on my classroom shelf. In it, Lee Bennett Hopkins collected poems about places around our country. His contribution was a poem titled Langston.
Though his professional writing was successful, it was the death of poet Langston Hughes in 1967 that proved to be a spark for Hopkins’s career of anthologizing poetry for children.
By Shannon Maughan |
Aug 13, 2019
While borrowing a few lines as well as the form of this poem and reading his obituary on Publishers Weekly, I wrote this poem for Lee.
Margaret Simon, 2019
His Dusts of Dreams
after Lee Bennett Hopkins “Langston”
for Lee Bennett Hopkins, 1938-2019
Who would have known
a young boy
of divorce,
a poor student
inspired by a teacher
would find his footing
in education–
from student
to teacher
to collector of poems,
With greetings to all
Dear Ones,
he left
his dusts of dreams.
Reflections on the Teche 