A Poem

Dear readers,

The world is full of poetry. It is the crinkled face of the woman at the bus stop, whose hands tremble so much that she cannot hold her cup of cheap coffee. It is the night vision of the Capitol building. It is memory: my first time singing "Angel" by Sarah McLachlan, my mother teaching me to do laundry, driving through the rambling fields of England with my father talking about becoming a novelist. It is the quick, quiet call of your heart out of itself towards the story of Echo and Narcissus, because try as you might, you hear yourself echoing someone else's words. It is the agony of waiting to be beautiful, or waiting to be told. It is the book you open and inhale, smelling its mustiness and promise. It is your ponderings about predestination as a poker game, drawing with words the oak tree covered in Spanish moss that sits in the old cemetery in Selma, AL.

Today I want to share with you a poem I have loved for a long time, by a poet named Lisel Mueller. She writes this about Monet:

Monet Refuses the Operation

Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don't see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don't know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent. The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and changes our bones, skin, clothes

to gases. Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Do you have poems you love? Send them to me - I love to hear new poems and people's favorites.

Love,

Hilary

"I'm tired!" (or, Why I Sometimes Question The Human Desire to Procreate)

"I'M TIRED!" Georgia flops her head down into her reading comprehension homework. She squints one eye at me from beneath her folded, hot-pink-sweatshirt clad arms. Deep breath, Hilary, deep breath. You are Mary Poppins. You are light and airy and holding a magic pencil. "You can't be tired!" I smile jovially, as if letting her in on a big secret to the nature of reality. She isn't buying it. Seriously? SERIOUSLY! You've been here five minutes! The walls are brightly colored and full of friendly faces! There are snacks in the next room! Your homework does not include a six page annotated bibliography!

Georgia grins mischievously, and continues to resist my efforts to put pencil to paper and name the three types of clouds or give three example of citrus fruits. Just as I'm thinking, "Fine! I give up!" Ms. Mary walks by. Ms. Mary is the leader of the Little Lights program where I'm doing this service learning project, and Ms. Mary is the person I'd need to impress if I was ever trying to prove that I deserve to work with children. Just as she pauses by the desk to listen, Georgia slams her pencil to the paper, draws a dark line straight down through the paragraph, questions and blank spaces for her answers, and kicks her feet against the desk. Great. Just great. She picks this moment to throw the big hissy fit and make me look like an incompetent fool. Score: Georgia 1, Hilary 0.

I didn't make a comeback for the Georgia-Hilary showdown. She finished her homework as crankily as possible, shoved it into her bag and huffed off without so much as a "goodbye." Fine, I thought to myself, that's fine. But what I was probably really thinking is, "That girl has an attitude I'd like to kick to the moon and back a few times!" or maybe, "How is it that a seven year old can manage to procrastinate with 'I'm tired' ? What exactly do seven year olds DO that could possibly be so tiring that a paragraph is too much to read?"

The truth is, of course, that students like Georgia are precisely the reason that I want to teach. I seriously think children calculate the exact right moment to tip the flower vase over, spill soap on the floor, cut their sibling's hair, throw their peas at the wall, and throw a homework fit. They know when it will make a maximum impact. They know somehow that if they wait until a teacher/parent/cool adult/impressive person is there, and THEN they explode/implode/wreak havoc/freak out, me, the babysitter/tutor/weak adolescent/poor college kid will look stupid. Children know these things.

But there is something profoundly humbling about realizing how much Georgia needs help with her homework. There is something about watching her sound out the words slowly and hesitantly that makes me stop my tirade and think about the opportunities I've been given to learn and grow. Mrs. Budd poured into my first grade mind the knowledge of how to read books. Mrs. Panikian poured into my third and fourth grade mind how to write paragraphs and science reports. Mr. Columbo poured into my fifth grade mind the knowledge of the three branches of government. Mrs. Cooper poured into my sixth grade mind a love for asking questions and writing good sentences.

And then high school it becomes blurred into the names: Yasmine, Allegra, Josh, Jim, Charles, Peter, Neil, John Wigglesworth, Christiane, Matt, Vicki, Holly, Greg Moss, Francis, Steve, Tim Bakland, Tim Averill... there are so many, I couldn't count them. And don't get me started on the influential people at Gordon (we'd be here forever).

And then I look at Georgia. She's wearing a hot pink shirt, her black hair pulled back by a rubber band. Her chewed fingernails skim the surface of the paper as she points to each syllable and speaks slowly. She comes from the Potomac Gardens, a low-income housing project in DC. She comes from a family who looks very different from mine. She thinks of school as hard and frustrating. Her shoes have city dirt on them, and her voice has a slight accent, Southern and not at the same time. Her dark eyes look at me skeptically, and I can't say I blame her. I've sat in my folding chair fuming that she won't do her reading, won't work on her homework, and that she pitched a fuss in front of Ms. Mary.

Maybe she is tired. Maybe she is tired of having trouble with her homework, of it always being hard. Maybe she is tired of seeing a new visitor or volunteer at the program every day. Maybe she is tired of wondering whether or not she is good enough at something. And with these thoughts comes the stunning realization that as a teacher I could help Georgia not be tired. I could help her with her homework, teach her to love books, be a consistent presence in her life, teach her that she is good at many things.

We've been talking about vocation in class for the past two weeks, and this is the first time I think I've seen the possible future of my own sense of calling. Georgia might have been tired this afternoon; but if teachers exist who can make learning exciting, who can love their students and want to see them grow, who can be faithful presences in young lives, then Georgia might not be tired the next time I see her.

It's late, all. Thank you for reading.

Hilary

You Ain't Go No Alibi: Watching U.G.L.Y. performed by the Howard University Theatre Department

"Ugly, Gina, ugly, Gina!" The jeers and insults drip from the girls' mouths onto the audience. They may be dressed in normal jeans and T-shirts, reading their parts from scripts and music propped up on music stands, but I am mesmerized. I can't even see their faces for the hoard of people crowding towards the roped-off seating area. I remember that I am in love with theater (like art, science, and... french, too).

It's the booming nature of their voices over my head, into the back of the long, carpeted "Grand Foyer" of the JFK Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. It's the colloquialisms that have the audience laughing and clapping as we hear our own voices captured in theirs. It's the way that every inflection is magnified, every dirty look or pitying glance or lovestruck gaze or hopeful tremor until it can be seen by the 600 people gathered in the room. How can you not love this form of art? It is the acting, but above the acting. It's the music, but through the music. It's the script, but more than the script. Theater, the "performing arts" is the place where everything is used, and nothing wasted. Choices actors make to look left or right, step forward or not, are used by the director to say something about the character. Lights are used, music is used, costumes and makeup are used. There's tremendous economy in theater. It even uses its audience to be part of the process and product!

So imagining to myself that Washington, DC is full of budding theater-lovers and possibly some pretty fantastic plays is like imagining myself in a giant room full of my favorite books, being told I can spend as much time there as I want and read everything as much as I want (a more typical analogy would be the old kid in the candy store - but personally I think that poor kid is trapped in the store and so sick that she'll eat nothing but carrots and celery the rest of her days after being force-fed copious amounts of Twizzlers, chocolate, M &Ms, lollipops and Peeps). It's hard not to jump up and down and say, "Okay, let's forget about class and work and just go watch plays!"

I know I can't do that, but the thought is tempting. That's one of the things about being in a city: everything is a bus/metro ride, or walkable, and you're tricked into thinking that you can just hop on something and go regardless of your other commitments. But there's also something so special about being close to where these things are happening. I find my mind thinks more and more about theater and art and music now that there are opportunities to hear those professionals outside my door. I am more aware of, even in just a little bit of time, the buzz and energy of the arts in the city.

Yesterday when I was getting coffee with a friend at Port City Java on 7th St, SE (right by Eastern Market), a live performance of folk music was being set up. My apartment and some other girls went to the 9th Annual "Page to Stage" performance of Darius Smith's U.G.L.Y. at the Kennedy Center last night. There was a concert on Capitol Hill, a blue festival out towards Maryland (or Virginia...), there are art galleries and museums everywhere you turn. Washington, DC may be a land of politics and power, but it's got an underbelly of artistic and theatrical life that I feel especially excited to explore.

So for all you out there following this blog who love theater and the arts, I'm with you! I can't wait to keep you all posted on my forays into Shakespeare, musicals, ballet, new plays, the Portrait Gallery, the Renaissance wing of the National Gallery...

Off to Internship Orientation class in a bit!

Have a wonderful day,

Hilary