You see, even though Skylar has done an amazing job of keeping her distance from the so-called "popular girls" while also fending off the jealousy of students in the gifted program -- she was only admitted this year, but is at the top of her class -- she still needs positive affirmation in her educational environment. And winning an award is one way to do it.
Yes, her fellow aspiring poets may resent her, but the majority of her schoolmates know that they aren't about to win a poetry contest and have respect for those who can. Especially the girls, who are so hard to impress at this age.
The best part was that Skylar was late for school that morning and missed the announcement, which meant that other students in her first-period class gave her the news. The impulse to congratulate is apparently stronger when one gets to be the bearer of good tidings.
Last year Skylar wrote some great poems for someone her age, but didn't win something for the first time since she started elementary school. The reason, as I surmised at the time, was partially that her writing had outgrown the context in which it was being evaluated and partially that her subject matter was too remote for the well-off Foothills of Tucson:
San FranciscoHer poetry unit this year wasn't very long and happened when she was preoccupied and recovering from an illness. She did all her serious writing in a single evening, coming up with two poems she was happy with. The first, inspired by visiting my mother in the hospital, was my favorite and hers:
A crumpled mailbox stands
on a sunny Oakland street,
while the smoggy windows of a subway
block out views of the station,
ever in a hurry,
away from spray-painted fences
ripped by yowling Rotweilers,
away to the arches of the sunset,
away to all the alley cats slinking,
and skyscrapers tearing blue cotton,
away from the crumpled mailbox
on a sunny Oakland street.
Remembering her experience the previous year, however, she chose to submit the other poem she composed that evening, because it was about school:
The Hospital
A crinkled mattress sighs
In the small hospital room
Reminiscing
Over patients
They came and went
Some dying
Under the plastic sheets
Cheap as dime store bubblegum
Others escaped
The fluorescent tubes
To watch the sun
Bleach rooftops
And shove despair
Into the shadows,
Slinking away like a
Stray animal
Back to the hospital,
Pale as a scar,
The room
Where light
Might as well
Be darkness
My Walk Into SchoolPersonally, I prefer the school poem she wrote last year, which has a more complicated nesting of tropes:
My coat feels itchy
Clinging to me
An extra skin
I seize it
To protect me
From the rain splattering the pavement
I shuffle past
The cars
Stained with the shivering rain
Dull as the frowning sky
I shuffle down the crosswalk
dappled with wet freckles
Students walk
In front of the school
Staring at me
In my big, black coat
Their eyes drive me
Into a mental fishbowl
On display
The rain shrivels
When it bounces off my coat
But the stares seep right through
And dampen my spirits
I would rather blunder
Through a hurricane
Than have to make it
Past this crowd
CliquesBut I understand why the poem she wrote about her big, black coat won the district-wide award, even though I wish she could stretch herself without being punished. Thankfully, she feels the same way. Given the boost in confidence that winning this year provided, however, her pragmatic approach to the contest was clearly the correct one.
The swift girls and boys glide,
as an assortment of varied clichés,
while a lone drop of rain plops
in an ocean far away,
away from the whispering shore.
The ocean water from far away
slinks through a tap
at a department store,
where pencils and erasers are sorted
by their own pleasures,
a fraction of apples and oranges,
never knowing what lies
on the other side.
