The Framed Poem

My Indonesian student wrote and gave it as a gift for me

Unexpected gifts are the best.

It was the end of the academic year and I was shyly handed a box by the one Indonesian student in my English class. She was a mathematician (Phd) and had needed a lot of encouragement one particular day, to join in with the class activity I had set all the students, to … write a poem!

I refuse to pander to the ‘high art’ aura that poetry has become; a tool of elites in extremely hierarchical societies. Rather I have always used my position as a teacher to create an atmosphere of a humanistic, emotionally nurturing atmosphere. In that vein, I like to convey to my students (learning English as an additional language) that poetry is a natural form of self expression.

Like the Brazilian adult educator, Paolo Freire, I believed that education must be empowering, not a tool to engender pacification and convince students they must be spectators, merely absorbing and regurgitating information for the purpose of passing exams.

That particular day after the Easter holidays, I’d brought a couple of poems with different themes to share with my class. One rythmed, and one did not but was replete in metaphor and imagery. I recited the whole of one poem aloud, asking the students to follow with their eyes on the page. We discussed the meaning and the message in the poem. Then I gave as dictation, a couple of the verses. After that, I asked for students to volunteer to read a verse of the poem themselves.

Eventually I invited the students to work on writing their own poems, with the prompt, ‘A Special Memory’.

Well, that session in class had such an impact on the one Indonesian student in the class! She was new, both to the country and to the class. Until then, she’d been quite withdrawn and quiet. But from that day on she really flowered and a few weeks on, she thanked me and mentioned how writing poetry had expanded her sense of self, from being a dry facts and figures kind of mother and mathematician, to someone more heart-connected, writing … poetry!

Later she confided she was having issues with her husband and with child-care. Getting to know her way around a town that was new, speaking a language she’d never needed to use in day to day life, was all one difficulty piled upon another, resulting in her being late for class quite often.

Soon, it was the end of the year. She wanted to express her appreciation and so she wrote a poem for me, framed it and brought it to class on the last day of term.

What the words might lack in cadence or the poem in structure, rhyme or complex literary conventions, is made up for, by the sincerity of her appreciation of my teacherly aura and efforts! The humorous touch at the end is priceless!

So it is one of my most treasured gifts.

Here it is:

With thanks to Ali Hall for this prompt: ‘gift’.

I’d like to recommend Mila Verita’s article about the benefits of community gardening. It bestows gifts on multiple levels! As she says, it’s not only an opportunity to talk and connect with others, but also the value of reciprocal learnings and sharings is seeded while tending to the land that nurtures us. Also, her artwork is beautiful and unusual, centering an old woman rather than a young girl in skimpy clothing, which if you ask me, happens too often in too many contexts! This alone gives her words a greater depth and dignity.

Given the title, I was expecting to read a philosophical piece about rain, and was surprised to learn from William J. Spirdione’s article that mushrooms have existed for 700 millon years. That really made me pause for thought concerning the hubris of humans who have only existed for some thousands of years. Another new fact I learnt from Wiliam’s fine meditative piece of writing was that fungal spores carried by the wind, can help the rain to fall!

Mind-blown.