We have read a lot of poems at Yale Elementary this year. We have read haiku, concrete poems, prose poems, sonnets, shape poems, slam poems, lyric poems, and more. From Emily Dickinson to Saul Williams, and from e.e. cummings toYusef Komunyakaa, we have covered a broad spectrum of work. Realizing this, I decided that one of the best ways to refresh the students' minds about what we have done would be to write centos.

The cento is essentially a poem comprised of lines from other poems. In order to demonstrate the form, I authored a cento entitled "A Cento for Chicago, From Atlanta", using lines from nearly all of the poems we have studied thus far. My poem was not wildly successful by any measure, but the centos which the students composed in response are quite skillful. They have managed to weave content from disparate poets (and they have included themselves alongside the studied poets as they well ought to) together in such a way that the themes and the poetic devices which we have studied this year are on full display.

In effect, the cento is our poetic form which most nearly resembles the musical phenomenon of the mash-up. I hope you find these centos as phenomenal as I do.

Mrs. Fleming's Class (8th grade)

Mixture
Ashley P.

The morning after Death
My black face fades hiding
inside the black granite.
Sometimes faint, far
then suddenly, close,
just beyond the screened
door as if someone
there squats in the
dark honing his
wares against my
threshold

My revolving door is
my heart because people
walk in & out & my heart
is never torn apart.
You have been there for
me through my trials
& tribulations
a sift of lost faces
For all the yelling,
screaming, intense conversations
to make me into a
better person
I hear you

Untitled
Deandre B.

I am from clothes
pins to fudge
and eye glasses

All night, wind
rippled saxophones
that hung like
windchimes in pawn
shop windows.

I was your rebellious
son do you remember
me?

The sweeping up the
heart and putting love
away, we should not
use again until eternity

My favorite day is Sunday
my favorite color is my
father's pear trees.

I learned from my mother
how to love the living

O I am my own
way of being in view yet
invisible of being in view

That scraping of iron on
iron when the wind rises,
what is it

I'm from the know it
alls and the pass it ons.

Others Poem
Shalisa T.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner.

My favorite time of day
is when no one can find me

Something, loose and not right.

O I am my own way of
being in view and yet invisible
at once hearing everything.

And old silent pond...

I learned to create from
another's suffering my own
usefulness, and once you know
how to do this, you can never
refuse.

I am from those moments...
snapped before I budded...

In just spring when the world
is mudluscious the little lame
balloonman.

In a city like that one might
sail through life led by a runaway
hat.

My black face fades hiding
inside the black granite.

And we will seek the quiet
hill, where towers the cotton tree.

Ms. Tillery's Class (7th / 8th Grade)

Untitled
Kyera S.

I hear you
with no leaves to blow
the morning after death
so that the streets seem haunted
a creaking and groaning
of bone growth or body
death
my favorite window looks onto
two oceans
life and death.

Untitled
Dante V.

The Bustle in a house
The shivering birds beneath the eaves
My clouded reflection eyes me like a
bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning
Under my bed was a dress box
spilling old pictures
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering,
breaking
So here's the plan The ides of
march are always at hand
And when the power hungry strike
they strike the poorest of man.