Note: The following blog entry comes to us from our colleague and friend, Betsy K. Brown, who teaches and chairs the humanities program at Cicero Preparatory Academy in Scottsdale, Arizona. A graduate of Seattle Pacific University’s MFA in Creative Writing program, with a focus on creative nonfiction, Betsy loves to share the goodness of words and stories with young people amid the beauty of the American Southwest.
Below are three more poems by former members of my ninth grade poetry class. In this particular set of poems I am struck by how each form—haiku, sonnet, and villanelle—has so beautifully influenced the word and rhythm choices of each student. Frost once said that poetry without form is tennis without a net. These students have found the joy in the challenge of keeping up that net.
Haiku
By Danish Kapur, Cicero Preparatory Academy Class of 2020
Would you believe me
If I told you a flower
Bloomed in a dark room?
Icarus’s Love
By Darby Williams, Cicero Preparatory Academy Class of 2023
I love you as Icarus loved the sun;
Enough to give me strength—perhaps too much.
He wished to brush Apollo’s light and won,
But soon learned it was too great for his touch.
With his heart and mind intertwined, he flew
From that island, but the searing sun scorched,
And closer cam Poseidon’s deep blue.
He crashed with wax and quill wings all but torched.
Icarus wept, for his love was too strong.
Icarus wept, for he had never felt
The love he wanted to feel for so long.
I loved you as Icarus loved the sun’s beams,
But that love is no more than mere past dreams.
Broken Snow
By Andrew Dowell, Cicero Preparatory Academy Class of 2022
Long ago, so gently I came creeping,
Creeping through a broken forest snow,
Past the trees that touch the sky a-weeping.
And through the path that was a-seeping,
Seeping on the path I walked on slow,
Long ago, so gently I came creeping.
Then light, through forest, there was a steeping,
Steeping through branch and leaf and snow, a glow,
And the light, so bright I was a-weeping.
Past the trees, a being there was a-sleeping.
The face of an angel I did not know.
Long ago, so gently I came creeping.
My fragile state, my life in being,
Passed before me of memories long ago.
My fear is heaping, my heart is weeping.
Yet the angel smiled, the light was leaving.
And as I stood on broken snow, so
Long ago, so gently I came creeping,
Creeping through the forest snow, not weeping.
Cicero Prep, Education, Great Hearts, Poetry, Poetry Foundation, Reading
