Mar 1, 2013 Teaching and Learning
I wrote this poem in December, immediately following the Sandy Hook tragedy. It completely took me apart. I took refuge in writing a poem, because that’s all I could do, after those dreadful hours of grieving, to deal with the unthinkable. Please do read and let me know what you think.
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In Memoriam – Sandy Hook
©By Vijaya Sundaram
Written on December 16th, 2012
O hold on to your rainbows bright,
O Children of the shadowed Dream.
O hold on to your unicorns, for
Things are not quite what they seem.
On the edges lurks the dark
Wedged behind those pretty parks
Run, my child, before it leaps
That monster from the scary deeps.
Hold your breath and lift your wings
Catch the breeze under your swing
Jump up high into the air
Live your life, don’t turn a hair.
______________________________
Refrain:
Monsters come and monsters go,
It’s you for whom our sorrow flows.
But we’ll go strong into the night
And whisper hope to make things bright.
______________________________
This world is not for hate and hurt
This world is not for grief and rage
You should be playing in the dirt,
And love your happy, youthful stage.
We’ll whisper deep into the morn
We’ll sing a song of love for you
We’ll work for all who have been born
We’ll bring the dawn above to you.
Forgive us for the world we’ve made
Forgive us for the sins of trade
Forgive this hateful history
And show us love’s deep mystery.
___________________________
Refrain:
Monsters come and monsters go,
It’s you for whom our sorrow flows.
But we’ll go strong into the night
And whisper hope to make things bright.
_____________________________
Tags: #Childhood, #Original Poetry, grief, parenting, sandy hook, teachers
Feb 17, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Teaching and Learning
What would I like to post?
I’d like to post a letter to this planet:
Hello, Earth! What have you been up to in the past week?
Ah yes, a meteor hit the upper atmosphere above the Urals in Russia. Tethered to the planet, we see signs of an imminent inescapable route to extinction. Right? Wrong!
Okay, we are seeing the signs of a possible mass extinction. I mean, didn’t millions die? What’s that you say? Oh, about 1,200 people were injured from the shock generated by it?
Regardless, I feel bad that such a thing happened, and guilty because I’m glad it didn’t happen here, or at least it hasn’t happened yet.
So, when that meteorite comes blazing out of the sky, that’s it, then. How apocalyptic, how random, how utterly pointless to have that tangent to our circle which goes off-course!
We need a blanket that repels those visitors from our solar system, and not just the atmosphere. Let’s create one now. Right!
What however, if you, Earth are suffering from an auto-immune disorder known as human life? What then? Will we be long gone before any meteoric strikes of the truly apocalyptic variety?
Do you remember what happened in December, those events whose shock waves continued into January, O Earth?
Two terrible events came to occupy our news — on December 14th, six adults and twenty children died in an elementary school because of the unhinging of a man, and on December 16th, a twenty-three year old Indian woman was brutalized in the most horrifying way by six unhinged men.
The first event created sorrow and despair in all of us, but it wasn’t long before the crazies in the organization that aims to “protect” the Second Amendment, all stepped up with bizarre rationalizations for MORE weapons. When that meteor came and struck, some went about, creating false myths about it, turning a blind eye to that which was under their noses. Where did the souls of those people go? Where has conscience fled? Where have empathy and reason gone? Are those people who deny the massacre even human?
After the horror of the young woman’s death, India came together, and has had mass rallies, protests, clashes with the police, men and women speaking out against the blame-the-victim attitude of a male-dominated society. Awareness hit like a shock wave, and shattered many people’s hearts. In many Indian cities, men are becoming more aware and women are standing up for their right to be free in a fettered society, while the male-dominated Indian villages speak about pernicious Western influences and blather on about how women dress, which, they proclaim, invites their fate. What does it take to change the minds of all people? What MORE will it take?
Meanwhile, wars continue around the earth. Women and children get sold into slavery, to be exploited brutally, then killed when things get complicated for the exploiters. Young men, the best and sometimes (but not always) the brightest, push off to fight other young men, eliminating any future for either. Greed is rampant. Fear and hatred rule the foolish and the venal. Everything, but EVERYTHING becomes a mind game, or worse, a game of war and peace.
And we buy, buy, buy, more and more stuff, more and more electronic and digital toys. And somewhere in the Congo and elsewhere close by, women and children are brutalized by mercenary soldiers who wish to control the lands that contain coltan, that combination of minerals which our cell-phones and laptops need. The gentle and the innocent, with all that potential for life, peace, hope and beauty are wiped out by greed-unhinged bestial creatures masquerading as men, while the land around them is mercilessly plundered.
Those meteors strike human lives every day, every single day. I cannot even wrap my mind around that.
Is this the beginning of suicide of the human species? Are we, the individual cells in the complex organism called human life, dealing with a deadly auto-immune disorder? Are we ever going to achieve balance? Will we see reason? I speak not of the few and far-between, but of the whole.
I am a teacher, and I work for the cause of reason and the intellect. I work for the cause of empathy and kindness. I work for the cause of sharing responsibility for the planet, when I head the “Green Team” at my school, and recruit children to deal with “reducing, reusing and recycling” for the Planet. I work to bring some measure of sanity to the insanity that afflicts my life and the lives of those I know. (Of course, I may not always succeed, irrational and irritable that I might seem to my nearest and dearest when I am tired or sleepy, but I try, I try!) I work to bring the beauty of language and literature into the drab vocabulary of the working world, when I teach Shakespeare, or Steinbeck, or Gaiman. I work for the cause of creating a space for children speak their minds, and for their right to weave their emotional and aesthetic lives into their poetry in my Friday afternoon Poetry Club. I work for the cause of right over wrong, for the cause of humanity over inhumanity within my very small milieu, when I teach about the Civil Rights Movement, and we read Melba Pattillo Beals’ book Warriors Don’t Cry, or when we study the Jewish-holocaust period in Europe. At least, it’s something, or so I tell myself.
Today, right now, in the depths of the night, I’m not so sure.
If earth is suffering from an auto-immune disorder known as humanity, a meteoric visitor from outer space wouldn’t be a bad thing.
I’ll be all right tomorrow, I’m sure. But today … today is all about despair. I’m sorry!
Tags: #Peace, auto-immune disorder, delhi gang-rape, gaiman, meteor strike, Planet Earth, sandy hook, Shakespeare, steinbeck, War