Onward I go

My students have just finished writing poems. Each of them was asked to produce a chapbook of original poems and we spent nearly an hour reading to one another in the reading garden at my school. Every year I am flooded with emotion as I listen to the words of my students...to the emotions they've struggled onto the page...to the way they've put words to what cannot be said.

This year I made a list of the poems they shared. In reading the titles I'm reminded of how much my students feel, how much they know, how much they are learning. The learning they've shared in these poems, though, stretches far beyond knowledge...my students are wiser, their lives are richer, their pain is more aptly identified and catalogued, and they have grown. My, how they've grown. 

May we all feel that sense of freedom and growth, that triumph that comes from putting words to emotions and saying, here world...this was mine, but now it is yours. Do with this what you will and onward I go...