For our penultimate workshop, students in Ms. Smallwood and Ms. Hernandez’s classes wrote poems from the point of view of people, animals, and things other than themselves. To get us started, we read “According to Bread” by Lesléa Newman. Students were drawn to the use of double meaning in puns an as well as the melodrama in the tone of this poem and took some inspiration from that in their own work. Please enjoy the below sample of some of their poems.
Ms. Smallwood
6th Grade
Dog
Amelia B.
I live with my family
they love and feed me
I have the best life
and it’s easy I live
for a long time
and even though I’m
20 ft underground they
still love me.
I’m boring
Aviry R.
78 years ago they made me
and gave me a number!
57 W. House St.
Then they built twins next to me!
Everyday is the same
I wake up and stretch my creaky old wood
Then these people walk around
it makes my insides hurt
After that, they leave! They didn’t say sorry.
I watch them leave
leave me alone
’cause I’m too boring for them
Each night they come back to hurt me.
Clearly I’m unwanted
Clearly I’m not good enough
Clearly all the new houses are better
because the people now live in number 56.
Mr. Chicken
Rosie N.
AHHHHhhhhhh
oh, sorry. I thought you were a farmer.
Anyway… I’m Mr. Chicken, or Dr. Chicken if you will.
Once upon a time in a land not that far away,
known to you as Virginia
I met my wife, Lindsey. We moved up here to
Idaho.
A few years later, we had our first son.
CJ or Chicken Jr. He grew up right here, where
we are standing.
Right now.
He made up his own dance, called “the Chicken dance”
Then we had our second child.
Baby Chicken was beautiful from the second she came out.
Looked just like her mother, she did.
Anyway
que siento
Sara
que siento por la gente hay diferentes emociones
pero si conosco una persona voy a estar feliz
si no la conosco para mi ni siquiera lo miro
pero si no la conosco tanto no confío tanto en
esa persona
Ms. Hernandez
7th Grade
Grass
Daniel G.
the tall fields of grass
a way to get
lost,
a miracle that uses
the sunlight for the
step of food,
growing slowly as
cells making
100 new ones,
can easily
be broken
or folded,
grass what
a miracle
that was
made
A piece of paper
Charlie H.
I get pulled out of
a pile of all my other
paper friends
I get written on over
and over again.
Go in the trash.
get taken to the dump
out near the ocean.
The wind blows me
out in the water.
Then I sink and rest
there forever
Bottle of Water
Michael D.
I am a bottle.
Being made right now.
Water put down my throat.
Cap put on my head.
Label on my hips.
Gone to a truck.
Truck off with my other friends.
To Chicago
I wake up, a dewy morning
Abbie L.
I wake up, a dewy morning
sun flowering from behind
clouds.
A bed of grass stretching
and the trees waving
good morning through
the breeze.
I narrowly avoid the
graze of an incompetent
passer-by. This ruins my
day. Being a flower is
hard.
My petals wilt and leaves
droop “I hate how people
don’t watch where they’re
going.”
