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When we returned from our holiday break, I found a poem from Poets.org in my inbox. I subscribe to Teach this Poem, a weekly lesson plan around a selected poem. The poem Dead Stars by Ada Limón drew me in, and I felt compelled to teach the lesson. To begin, we looked at pictures of the Orion constellation and made attempts to draw it in our notebooks.
Before we read the poem, I talked about how I love poems that take notice of something in nature then go deeper to something more profound.
We find it hard to settle our brains down, and poetry offers us that silence, that quiet space, and allows us to reconnect with ourselves, or with an idea, or with an emotion. (Ada Limón)
When reading a poem with my students, I let them take the lead. “What do you notice?” “Are there any words you don’t know?” “What do you think the poem is about?”
Each group of students takes the discussion in a different direction. With my first group, we discussed an interesting metaphor in this line, “I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.” Daniel rephrased the line, “Laying eggs of attempt.” Then we noticed that both hearth and nest are places of caring.
With my second group, theme became the focus. What is the poet trying to teach us? She wants us to rise above the tide (the hard times) and be alive. Landon wrote a thematic sentence, “Be alive, reach for the stars, and shine!”
In my third group, stars, constellations, and the fact that we are made of stardust became the topic of discussion. “But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising–” (Ada Limón)
I pulled up an article to read from National Geographic.
Everything we are and everything in the universe and on Earth originated from stardust, and it continually floats through us even today. It directly connects us to the universe, rebuilding our bodies over and again over our lifetimes. (Iris Schrijver)
In response I wrote a septercet, a form created by Jane Yolen with 3 lines of seven syllables each. The last line is from Ada Limón’s poem “Look, we are not unspectacular things.”
When I work on poetry with my students, I try not to push them to complicated analysis. There is time for that when they are older. I hope to expose them to amazing language, to the art and craft of metaphor, and to understand that poetry is always available to them. Even when they are “rolling their trash bins out.”
A cherita about the stars:
You say look up
Take notice of the stars
Name the one you are
We are the star
dust of many ages
collected as unique thoughts.
(c) Margaret Simon
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Reflections on the Teche 