When Shall We Tell the Children?
Next Thursday at 6:30 pm, please join me IN PERSON for a writing workshop at the beautiful Strathmore Mansion. Tickets are available here.
Today is the last day of national poetry month and I’m doing it up big. In the morning I went to a middle school to meet 12 children (a few quite skeptical) who will take an after school poetry class with me, and then I rushed to have a (v fancy) lunch with a convening of women I was delighted to find myself among, gathered together by Grace Cavalieri, who is a force.
Now I am sitting in a park downtown answering emails and writing this while waiting to head to the Poetry Out Loud SemiFinals this evening at the Lisner Auditorium, where I’ll be judging the dear children with three other poets. It’s one of my favorite things to do.
Sometimes I feel as though I’m running off the edge of a cliff and other times I feel like riding the tension of the wind like a kite and I don’t know which is the truth so here I am. Floating and flying and falling all at once.
So of course this week’s poem is lifted from my POL binder. The prompt is to think about what your favorite show was when you were a kid. Now free write about a specific episode that you remember pretty well. Reread what you’ve written and try to narrow what the lesson would be if the reality of that show held true.
CARTOON PHYSICS, PART 1
BY NICK FLYNN
Children under, say, ten, shouldn’t know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies
swallowed by galaxies, whole
solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning
the rules of cartoon animation,
that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries
will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,
ships going down—earthbound, tangible
disasters, arenas
where they can be heroes. You can run
back into a burning house, sinking ships
have lifeboats, the trucks will come
with their ladders, if you jump
you will be saved. A child
places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus,
& drives across a city of sand. She knows
the exact spot it will skid, at which point
the bridge will give, who will swim to safety
& who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn
that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff
he will not fall
until he notices his mistake.
