Badgerblog

Today, on one of the hottest days of the year, Central Texas students are filling the halls of their elementary, middle, and high schools for the first time since that glorious day in May when summer began. The buses are up and running, crossing guards are in place, textbooks are cracking open, and students are sporting the pinnacle of first-day fashion. In commemoration of the big day, Badgerdog is highlighting our friends at Hillcrest Elementary School in Del Valle Independent School District. Some of the students at Hillcrest spent three weeks this summer with Badgerdog Instructor Cara Zimmer writing experimental love poems, describing themselves through metaphor, and writing outlandish stories. We hope you enjoy this showcase of their talents!

A Plastic Shopping Bag in Love with a Sunflower

My Lovely Sunflower,

I love the way you sway when the wind is whistling.

Your bright yellow petals make me want to sing to you, even though you might be embarrassed in front of your sunflower friends.

You are my plastic shopping bag, even though you’re not a plastic shopping bag—I love you just the way you are.

Whenever it rains, I will cover you and keep you as dry as the desert. I’ll be wet as the ocean.

I never want to let people pick you from the ground.

I want to make you my Wonder Woman, and I want to be your Superman.

Out of every single sunflower in the world, you’re the only one I want.

There is an infinity of other things I could say—

You are my lovely. tall giraffe.

Sariyah, sixth grade

My I Am Poem

I am a chocolate bar—I have lots of nuts, and I am crunchy.
I am a rotten old chicken wing, and I taste like old, stinky bananas.
I am poison ivy that has spikes and itchy poison.
I am a sandwich that tastes great—I have lettuce, tomato, pickles, and ham.
I am a garbage truck—I pick up trash and leave it where it needs to be.

Fabian, fifth grade

Airplane Love

My Dear Lovely Boots,

I love the way
you move those soles,

and when you move
your legs, I stare at them.

I love the cotton
inside you,

and your shine
makes me want to kiss you.

You are my life, boots.

Love,
Airplane

Elizabeth, fifth grade

A Letter from a Trashcan to Mexico

My Dear Mexico,

I wish you would
be with me.

Every time you go,
I feel lonely.

When you come back,
I feel full of joy.

You’re my Skittle—
I wish I could just eat you.

Love,
Trashcan

Emily, fifth grade

A Love Poem from a Bookshelf to the Earth

My Dear Earth,

I love the way people swim in you.
I love your dolphins.
I love the pretzels in your malls.
I wish I could hug you.
My Dear Love, you’re better than all the planets.

Joanna, fifth grade

My Barbie Girl

Lovely Barbie,

I love your beautiful hair—
it’s so sparkly, like my screen.
I’ll type you every night and day.
I’ll put on romantic music for you, like D.C. Reto.
I’ll take pictures of you.
I like your body.
Want to go out?

Sincerely,
Computer

Fernando, fifth grade

To My Glowing Basketball, from a Pair of Air Jordans

I love the way you bounce up and down.
I like when you make hoops.
I’ll give you my autograph.
I love the way you feel bumpy.
I love your black lines because they’re dark,
but I’m scared of the dark—
I’m lucky you glow at night.

Sincerely,
Air Jordans

Areli, fifth grade

I Am a Ghost

I am a ghost.
I smell like garbage.
I feel like fuzz and slime when you touch me.
I look like a fuzzy cloud.
I sound like someone walking—you will scream all through the house.
I taste like a rotten egg.

Jasmine, sixth grade

A T.V. and a Backpack in Love

My Dear Backpack,

I love you because
you can carry me
around inside you.

And you shake yourself so good.

You make me hyper
the way you move that pocket—

That’s why you make me turn on,
and I love you so much.

Here’s my address—but you don’t know
how to walk, and I don’t
either.

The thing is: I’m too
heavy for you. I weigh fifty-two pounds.

And that’s all baby.

Andres, sixth grade

The Loving One-Hundred-Dollar Bill to the Goldfish Who Can’t Understand What’s Happening

To My Love,

I love the way you move your tail from left to right.
Your scales shine under the ocean light.
I wish I could go underwater with you, but I would get sticky.
I could make you rich, but you don’t want to be with me.
I could buy you anything you want—an aquarium! Anything! For you, my love, I would.

Chuy, fifth grade

Fun Things

I’m a yellow lion that eats carne al pastor.
I’m a brown door that’s open all the time.
I’m a red car that runs very fast.
I’m a lucky fish that lives in the ocean and swims and sleeps all day.

Luis, fifth grade

My Name

In English, my name means joyful. It doesn’t mean anything in Spanish. It’s pink, and it’s like the number 100. My name is Maria—it was my great-grandmother’s name. She was silly. At school, almost everybody has my name. I’d like to change my name to Melanie . . . But I still love my name.

Maria, sixth grade

Fluffy Surprise

I am fluffy.
I am tiny.
I am cute.
I have floppy ears.
I am living in a park—
Yup, you got it!
I’m a bunny!

Cristal, fifth grade

Window Love

My Dear Telescope,

I love the way
you look.
People use you
a lot, but they don’t
use me.
I wish I were
in outer space
so you could see
me, and I’d
think of you looking at me.
I can tell
you love me.
When you stare
at me and I stare
at you, all I think
about is you and me
together.
I love you
forever and always.

Karina, sixth grade

Mr. Spaceship

My Plastic DVD,

I love the way
you spin.

You make me wanna
beep, beep, beep.

You are the last piece
of my puzzle.

You’re like a love song
in my system.

Together we can fly
in hyper-speed.

Michael, sixth grade

President Chuy Returns

When I was in California, I was looking around. One day, I saw President Chuy. But then he died. Well, everybody thought he died, but really, he was in Acapulco, resting for a few years with his dog, Austin.

Acapulco smelled like fish because it’s a beach and they sell fish there. In California, it was snowing frozen sneakers and the sneakers and the air smelled good. I heard big footsteps—it was an elephant! It was a pretty color—a purple elephant! I had a dream that President Noel was screaming because his last pair of underwear fell down . . . but then Michael Jackson saved him.

Abrieana, sixth grade

Clock Love

My Dear Butterfly,

You look like a beautiful star
with beautiful antennae.
I like the way you
flap your wings.

I wish you could
be with me always.
I don’t want to lose you
because you are my sweety.

Noel, fifth grade

Daniela Is

I’m a super blue dot. I’m a queen that has slaves. I’m money, and I go from hand to hand. I’m smart because I teach. I’m chocolate ice cream—I go from mouth to mouth. I give people some light in the night—I’m a star. I save people—I’m a super dot. I’m vanilla Daniela. I’m a writer, and I write stories. I’m a diary that keeps secrets. I’m a lion—they won’t mess with me. I’m a monkey—I love bananas.

Daniela, sixth grade

The Boot’s Broken Heart

My Lovely Train,

I love how you move your wheels. I know you don’t like me because I’m tiny, and you’re huge. But I like to sing songs of love to you. I love your shoo shoo shoo shoo sound, Train. I’m going to invite you to the G.O. where you can drink gasoline and eat oil. We are going to get married and have a boy train and a girl boot. (That’s why I invited you to the G.O. Restaurant.) You can ride me to New York and Disney World and Laredo, Texas. I love how you use your superpowers like Spiderman. The thing I like the most is that we are a good family, like the song:

F-A-M-I-L-Y, F-A-M-I-L-Y,

Family, family.

When you’re in my heart,

you’re in my family.

Jocelyn, sixth grade

To be a writer is to build impossible worlds and make them seem real; the writer sits down to write and, one syllable after another, he paints in scents and sounds, puts one object here (not there), and focuses in on an image that reminds us of the connection between what we see and what we feel. The beauty of this awesome task is, in part, its room for possibility. The writer can create worlds we’ve never dreamed of and make the unusual come to life.

This week, we feature a writer who offers us into a rather absurd world. As you’ll see in this delightful poem, William transforms a spoon into an endless container, a bottomless well, then fills it with more and more of the impossible. Except, in the end—well . . . you’ll have to read for yourself.

The Ridiculous Spoon

—after Kit Wright’s “The Magic Box”

I will put in the spoon
A ninth planet with clouds of poison,
Water from the moon of Mars,
A plane running on hydrogen with helium from crackers.
I will put in the spoon
A goldfish with wings of steel,
A door when it is a leaf,
Fire on water with neon lights.
I will put in the spoon
The square of four when it equals seventeen,
The essence of pretzels on purple curtains,
Ramen on a plate with seasoning that doesn’t taste good.
I will put in the spoon
The last breath of a Martian-mallow,
And the first death of a cat with nine lives,
And electric fertilizer that kills grass.
This spoon is made of chopsticks, knives, and forks
With gasoline vapors inside the handle
And entire universes in the spoon part.
I will shrink into the spoon
Even though it doesn’t officially exist.

William, fifth grade, Badgerdog Creative Writing Summer Camp

This week’s Badgerblog selection combines imagery and rhythm to create an ominous effect. With each phrase and line of the poem, the picture in the reader’s mind expands and darkens, leading us to the final line—one we’ve all heard before but which appears again with new weight, threatening to undo us all. Congratulations to Leyla on a gorgeous poem!

Untitled

Carpet stapled onto a ladder, stapled
onto a roof, like elongated shingles,

A rainbow of windows casting a shadow,
like a painting,
like a painting,like stained glass in weathering
windowpanes, on top of the invisible house,
held up by a shipmast, a cement block,
a bedpost and a slithery wooden foot,
held up by a painted fist

on top of a wooden sign: “Those who do not
remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Leyla, twelfth grade, Badgerdog Creative Writing Summer Camp

To see a photo of Paradise Now! (The Salvage) by Matthew Day Jackson from the Blanton Museum of Art, which inspired this poem, click here.

Part of Badgerdog’s summer camp experience includes two getaways intended to provide a change of pace from the classroom environment and to offer other life forms and art forms as inspiration for students’ writing. This summer, for the first time, our elementary-aged writers took a trip to the Urban Roots farm, where they enjoyed an up-close look at the summer harvest, a little work in the fields, and plenty of grasshopper sightings. Though it was a hot, hot summer day in Texas, the students turned their experiences on the farm into beautiful poetry and prose, and we’re happy to share it with you this week. Enjoy!

Haiku

Round and very sweet.
It is red and fruity. Yum!
It is ripe today.

Angela, fifth grade

A Spider’s Point of View

I am a spider, and right now I am so angry at those human monsters. I spent two days finishing my web, and then those monsters came with a broom and bang, my web broke. My friends and I have tried to avoid those human monsters. We tried to tell the humans our webs are delicate, but they won’t listen. Right now, my family is sitting dead at the bottom of a dumpster.

It is really boring weaving a web. It is like weaving a basket. My mom taught me to weave a web. My first web was really small. But the web the monsters broke was as a big as this whole page. Most of my friends died because of the monsters. It is the worst life for a spider.

Francisca, fourth grade

A Day in the Life of a Tree

Sitting, watching, waiting. I have a sad, lonely life as an evergreen tree. My spikes are mean, and they will never go away or fall of because I am an evergreen tree. Other trees lose their mean leaves, and the mean ones turn different colors. But the innocent leaves are picked off the branches, for they lived on a regular tree.

I sit. I watch. I wait.

Sage, fifth grade

Green

The leaves
are as green as
a grasshopper. I feel
as fresh as the time
I opened my door
when the weather
was great!

The flowers
are like a garden
in a secret place
I have never seen.

Aditi, fourth grade

Field Trip

Hot
Sweaty
Summer
Day

Sweaty
Itchy
Fun
Day

Eric, third grade

A Two-Winged Dragonfly

Perching on a branch
Looking for a place to land
Fluttering away

Joshua, third grade

Beautiful Fields

I feel the smooth grass
I taste the sweet tomatoes
I see the tomatoes growing before me
I hear the crunch, crack, click of a bug

I taste the sweet tomatoes
I see the flutter of excitement
I hear the crunch, crack, click of a bug.
I see the flies flying away.

Joshua, third grade

The Flying Bug

Black and clear
Flying swiftly
Buzzing in your ear
Bumpy

Flying swiftly
Rough
Bumpy
And skinny.

Lauren, fourth grade

Weed Tree

A weed
as big as a tree.
A colossal, huge
weed. It’s
agony. It’s
impossible
to pull. Sweat
pouring down
my head.
I never got
it out.
Will it
ever
come out?

Alex, fifth grade

A Tree

In the middle
of nowhere
stands a lifeless,
twisted, deformed
tree. All the leaves
have fallen and
gone. What is
left is only
the hollow trunk
and the shady
branches, giving
the tree
a spooky image.

Alexander, sixth grade

Drying Onions

Drying out the onions
under the hay,
as dry as a hot desert.
The sun shines
as bright as a flashlight.

In the greenhouse,
it is hot, sweaty, and bright.
The sun bleeds through
like a marker on a paper.

Shreyas, fifth grade

This week’s featured writer brings us an inspiring poem both rich and spare in its language and execution. As you move through the stanzas, notice how light and dark, day and night dissolve, as you’re simultaneously invited to fly from earth to sky and back again. Congratulations to Shivani on a delicate and wondrous poem perfect for a summer evening.

Dark to Light

lost in the suffocating darkness
lost in thought

you see black
you see white
you see beautiful designs
unfold

black as dark as coal
silver and gold
white as bright as the sun

black

large black
large black sky
large black painting

at night

the sky is dark
children get scared
because all they
see is black

at night when we
look up we
see nothing
then
we see stars

white sparkling
wonders light
the soulless sky

we see the stars
we see hope

hope fills the sky
when we look
close
when we look
deep
we see pictures
unfold

they line up to
form
pictures
in the night sky
created by twinkling
wonders

under the bright
night sky we
see the choking
darkness.

Shivani, ninth grade, Badgerdog Creative Writing Summer Camp

If you’ve been to the Blanton Museum of Art lately, you may remember Max Weber’s piece New York at Night, a cubist rendering of the Big Apple during those delicate moments when the sky dims and the city lights flicker on. This same painting captured the imagination of one of our Badgerdog writers during a summer camp field trip last month.

Congratulations to Sahar! In this poem, she’s brought to life both the bustle of the city and the dynamism of Weber’s 1915 canvas. What a beautiful marriage of art and poetry!

New York at Night

A never-ending maze.
Streetlights.
Skyline.
Upside, downside, diagonal, horizontal—
You can see the same image.
You can see the streets, and the buildings,
But hidden in the chaos is calm.
Each skyscraper, each simple park
It is three-dimensional yet it appears two-dimensional.
Alleys, stairwells, passageways, paint crackling,
Then the light bright of NYC.
Beige.
____Green.
________Blue.
____________Gray.
________________Red.
____________________Yellow.
The sounds echo off every corner,
Every detail neatly integrated into modern chaos.
Every angle tells a different story.
Shining stars glisten.
All the little shops and stalls—
The randomness of it all.
The true spirit of New York at night
Is focused yet frenzy.

Sahar, eighth grade, Badgerdog Creative Writing Summer Camp

The beauty of the poem is often its ability to distill a mood, a scene, or a fraction of time into a small space on the page. This week’s Badgerblog selection does just that—transforming the long, rough ride of the cowboy and his herd into a brief but beautiful and exhausted expression. Congratulations to Benjamin on this poetic achievement (inspired by artwork in the Blanton Museum of Art) … and a very Texas poem, to boot!

Ol’ Slick Ear

Cowboys rope the cow
and have a hard time with them.
The longhorn cattle go a long way.

After a long, tough ride,
the cowboys get to market.

Their faces half covered in dust,
the cowboys ride home.

Benjamin, fifth grade, Badgerdog Creative Writing Summer Camp

Photo by Mary R. Vogt.

The haiku expresses so much with so little. It’s an ancient poetic form that strikes a beautiful balance between constraint and freedom. This week’s Badgerblog selection is a winning example of the haiku—a small and singular moment brought to life in seventeen syllables. Congratulations to Angela for a wonderful celebration of what it is to write!

Writing Haiku

Pencil lead scratching,
On stiff creamy white paper,
Beautiful writing.

Angela, fourth grade, Badgerdog Creative Writing Summer Camp

Though we may not welcome the scorching summer heat, the season does at least deliver a roaring burst of color—sunlight and flowers, rivers, swimsuits, and snow cones—all of it a welcome change from the monochromatic tones of winter. This week’s Badgerblog selection is a beautiful celebration of these various colors and the ways they liven up our lives.

Rainbow Colors

Lively pink is gentle, precious fur, as if from a soft, baby bunny.
Sunny yellow is a calm, fresh summer breeze as bright
as a sunflower’s silky petals. Blinding white is a lonely
depressing feeling, as if the gray were wiping a smile off your face.
Sensitive purple is a shy, blushing cheek like a glowing,
sparkly moon on your face. Proud blue is a dazzling, royal
blue sky floating above like a bucket of cotton balls
with twilight baby blue colors.

Annabel, third grade, Badgerdog Creative Writing Summer Camp

This week’s Badgerblog showcases a poem by a very talented third-grader from Smith Elementary. Ian read this same poem at our Spring Community-Wide Reading May 15, yielding laughter and delight from an audience of nearly one hundred people. Not only is Ian an excellent poet, but also an excellent performer. Congratulations!

If Cats Could Fly

If cats could fly, they’d be in the sky.
If cats could fly, pilots wouldn’t have to.
If cats could fly, we’d all cry.
If cats could fly, they’d have to watch out for ceiling fans.
If cats could fly, they’d be so high.

Ian, third grade, Smith Elementary School