Badgerblog

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.

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

—after Lisa Jarnot’s “Poem Beginning with a Line by Frank Lima”

And how bones it is to write a frail poem
Murder how murder it is on gun
On the dare and watch the bloods
Go by and how frail it is to be misled
Inside a death and how frail it is to be
Death as it murders inside the house
And how frail it is shaped like a pig
To be filled with hair and murder
And on the street and how frail it is to see the bloods
Inside the bones and knife and how frail the knife is
Killing at night in their trashy way
And burning through the haunts and
How frail is the night shrinking of the bells and
Distant knives and how frail it is to write this poem
As I fall to fall I’m the distant knives in my fish and in flame
The knives in death riding bloods to bones at night

Oliver, fourth grade, downtown summer camp

And so a storm rolls in,
in the sky
and in my mind,
where I find
even God cries
for the unhappiness
of a wayward son.

Vaughan, eleventh grade, St. Michael’s Catholic Academy

Our relationship is awkward.
Awkward hugs,
awkward smiles,
awkward silences.
We try our best
not to get too close,
not to hug that much.
Mostly because . . . it’s awkward.

I’ve known him since sixth grade.
He’s always been the
prideful,
competitive,
confident one.
Me, not so much.
I’m the one with
no pride,
uncompetitive,
and unconfident.
He wrote in my yearbook
last year,
“These years have been great
because you were always there
to be second chair,”
then was excited
when he rhymed “there” and “chair”
and didn’t even realize it
’til after he wrote it.

Lately though,
he has been rude and odd,
like he’s PMS-ing or something,
so that just adds to the awkwardness,
especially when that girl is all over him,
or his ex wants to get back with him
because he grew a couple of inches,
and they have three classes together.

I’m not angry
or jealous,
just filled with amazement
at just how
awkward
our relationship has grown over the years.

Jessica, ninth grade, Badgerdog alum