My Poem
There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.
There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother’s mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.
Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.
And I ask myself:
“Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?”
Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.
Curricular Competency Reflection
I chose the poem “My Grandmother’s Love Letters” by Hart Crane because, I am very close with both of my grandmas. I can really resonate with this poem because I love hearing about my grandma’s stories from when they were young, before I was born. “My Grandmother’s Love Letters” is about Hart Crane finding his grandmothers letters from when she was young and him getting a different view on his grandma’s life before he knew her.
The best-in-class activities that helped me be the most prepared to present was when we got with a partner, read our poems and the partner would create actions to the prompts in the poem.
Other than what we did in class, when I was at home, I would be getting ready for school or about to fall asleep and be listening to the recording of myself reciting the poem to make myself more prepared.
Creating the paragraph write about “My Grandmother’s Love Letters” helped me get a deeper understanding of the poem. When presenting it helped me with my tone of voice because I could understand the type of tone the poem was written in.
Core Competency Reflection
I appreciate feedback on my schoolwork and prefer it comes in the form of a teacher telling me what to work on.
I can contribute to and work with criteria to improve my own work; evidence of that is when we did our first in class write I didn’t have a strong topic sentence, after doing our in-class workshop, working on creating a strong topic sentence i feel much more confident with it.
In discussions and conversations, I help to build and extend understanding by collaborating and having conversations with my table groups around me.