moon city

Right now my class is in the middle of our poetry writing unit. It’s been really beautiful to see them use their “poet’s eyes” - discovering, exploring and inventing new landscapes through language. I’ve been getting a lot of ideas and inspiration from Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies and Dreams; here’s the wish poem we wrote together (I translated their inventive spelling to standard English). Each student contributed a line:

I Wish

I wish I was a rainbow castle
I wish I was a parrot with purple and orange digging.
I wish I was mean lion in the jungle.
I wish I was an airplane
I wish I was a cheetah
I wish I was a pink cat flying in New Orleans.
I wish I was an alligator that was blue
I wish I was a dolphin
I wish I was a fairy! I love flying!
I wish I was a blue bird flying home!
I wish I was a purple horse
I wish the world was made out of pink glass
I wish I could go far away then I wish I could go home
I wish I was a rainbow bird
I wish I was a balloon
I wish I was a bookbag.
I wish me and Tryniti were dolphins
I wish the world was made out of bubblegum.
I wish I was a mermaid with Heaven.
I wish I was a blue hero
I wish for everything!
I wish that I was a gazelle
I wish I was as fast as a cheetah 60 miles per hour
I wish that the world was made out of candy.
I wish I was a gorelgattr* flying and seeing people
I wish I could have all the Dr. Seuss books and movies!
I wish I could fly like a bat

* gorelgattr = gorilla + alligator. (I sense a future Lewis Carroll in our midst!)

Whole days would go by, and later their years,
while I thought of nothing but its darkness
drifting like a bridge against the sky.
Day after day I dreamily sought its melancholy,
its searchings, its soft banks enfolded me,
and upon my lengthening neck its kiss
was murmuring like a wound. My very life
became the inhalation of its weedy ponderings
and sometimes in the sunlight my eyes,
walled in water, would glimpse the pathway
to the great sea. For it was there I was being borne.
Then for a moment my strengthening arms
would cry out upon the leafy crest of the air
like whitecaps, and lightning, swift as pain,
would go through me on its way to the forest,
and I’d sink back upon that brutal tenderness
that bore me on, that held me like a slave
in its liquid distances of eyes, and one day,
though weeping for my caresses, would abandon me,
moment of infinitely salty air! sun fluttering
like a signal! upon the open flesh of the world.

Frank O’Hara
from Meditations in an Emergency