Off The Cuff Archive

While visiting Calhoun Middle/High School last week, I encountered Casey Harris, fifth grade English teacher, in the hallway. She uses The Calhoun Chronicle weekly in her class, which means all fifth graders get the paper each week. This is her second year at CMS.

 For some reason, it had not occurred to me that I have a whole new class of kids reading this year--a whole new class I had not yet met. Harris invited me to visit, and when finished in the office, down the hallway I went.

 In fifth grade, I was a geeky, round-faced kid with two front teeth half grown in and a Dorothy Hamill haircut (kids, you’ll have to look that one up). I attended a third through sixth elementary school set along the banks of the Ohio River, just below where the Muskingum River flowed in. In every class I had on the river’s side of the building, I was distracted by each barge that traveled by.

 We tried to hatch goose and chicken eggs that year. After days of begging, my parents agreed to let me have something that hatched, but the electric went off one weekend during the incubation and none of the eggs ever became anything other than just eggs. I do believe my parents were relieved.

 I remember one morning, in the damp valley fog, my creative writing class all filed together, down the hall and stairs, out the back side of the building, across the teacher’s parking lot, along the river bank, where we were told to spread out, sit quiet, and write a haiku poem. I wrote four:

a bridge is forming

 beyond the foggy morning

 no cars pass over

         waves are splashing

         onto the muddy bank

         soaking my two feet

 many trashy banks

 humanity has ruined

 a beautiful sight

        a little fossil

         imprints marking a large rock

         making it bumpy

As far as school memories, I don’t remember my teachers that year, or how I felt about life at the time, what I liked or disliked, or who my friends were. I don’t recall any worries, any fears, any issues beyond the eggs that didn’t hatch, and that I was assigned to do the Louisiana mini-float for the “Parade of 50 States” class project that rolled, with much festivity and fanfare, down the long hallway at the end of the year.

  Sure, I remember the faded barges of repeated memories, for I have now seen thousands of barges in my lifetime around that river. Each one seems the same, yet when I think today of the Ohio River from Marietta, the faded view from my fifth grade window comes to mind . . . and then, clear as day, it is that morning along the waters. I’m there again somehow in a dream and I can close my eyes and see it--the fog, the bridge, the trash, the fossil.

See, I remember that morning along the river like it was yesterday, because the poems that I wrote at that moment grabbed those images and feelings and kept them for me. So when I read them now, I can relive that memory.

 Writing doesn’t always have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to include long words or fancy phrases; doesn’t always require capital letters or punctuation. One of the great things about poetry is that while some forms of poetry make strict rules (like 5 syllables -7 syllables -5 syllables), other forms of poetry have no rules at all.

That morning along the river bank, with my fifth grade English class, I was first introduced to haiku and poetry. I have written nearly 10 poems since then, most created whenever I wanted to record a moment, or express and explore an emotion, or mark a memory I never want to forget.

 Why don’t you try it?

 It’s as simple as 5-7-5.