I know that your back pocket has a bunch of tried and true poems, but maybe there’s room for a few more. Here are five poems all written in the last 25 years that are hidden gems. Maybe you can unwind with one each day at the end of your teaching day. Maybe you want to update your poetry game and will devour them all in one sitting. Come to these poems how ever you want.
I gave you a little bit with each poem — my favorite line, a cool move by the poet, and a question to ponder. Just enough to get you thinking, yet plenty of wiggle room to do your own thing with them.
- Rosa Parks — by Nikki Giovanni
- Gate A-3 — by Naomi Shihab Nye
- Quarantine — by Eavan Boland
- Of History and Hope — Miller Williams
- Dead Stars — Ada Limon
Rosa Parks — by Nikki Giovanni
My Favorite Line:
“This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled as if they were happy and laughed like they were tickled
when some folks were around…”
A Cool Poetic Move:
Check out the paradox that culminates the poem:
“Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not
being able to stand it. She sat back down.
A Good Question to Ask: In your opinion, why didn’t Giovanni name the poem, The Pullman Porters”? Why do you think she chose the title, “Rosa Parks”?
Gate A-3 — by Naomi Shihab Nye
My Favorite Line:
“Such an old country tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.”
A Cool Poetic Move:
“Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.”
The first sentence is a loaded one and presents not only a great opportunity to discuss why “one pauses these days,” but also a chance to examine diction. “One,” as a singular reference, isolates a person from any part of the collective, and “these days” while casual in connotation belies the severity of its implication. Also, it is so easy to gloss past “I went there.” because of the terseness of its syntax. Yet, it has brilliant ambiguity, referring not only to the location of the gate but also mustering up the courage to go to a place of uncertainty and vulnerability.
A Good Question to Ask: What differences do you notice between the way in which the flight agent dealt with the woman and the speaker did? Why did those difference make all the difference?
Quarantine — by Eavan Boland
My Favorite Line:
“The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.”
A Cool Poetic Move:
By entitling the poem “Quarantine,” Boland shows how this couple had to separate itself from others during the Irish Potato Famine. Yet, the title gains an additional layer of meaning when the poem shifts in the last two stanzas. In telling this tale of suffering, this poem seeks to quarantine itself from traditional love poems. Those poems cannot cross this “threshold.” With this poem, “there is no place for the inexact praise of the easy graces or the sensuality of the body.”
A Good Question to Ask: When it says, “Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived,” where did they arrive? What was their destination?
Of History and Hope — Miller Williams
My Favorite Line:
“Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.”
A Cool Poetic Move:
There is an interesting analogy between children and gardens in the second stanza. Children rarely grow straight and neat. Their soil needs tending to and constant weeding. While they develop with “waving hands” and “flowering faces,” they must watch out for those brambles.
A Good Question to Ask: Who did it better? Miller Williams or Langston Hughes in “Let America Be America Again.”
Dead Stars — Ada Limon
My Favorite Line:
Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much.
A Cool Poetic Move:
There’s the powerful metaphor of us being “dead stars too.”
A Good Question to Ask: How can we say “no to the rising tides”? How can we stand “for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?”
