Poem of the Week, by Ed Bok Lee
“Is it lonely to be a writer?” “What is the greatest and worst thing about being a writer?” “I loved your book because the brother in it is mean to his sister and my brother is mean to me.” “What if reading is really, really hard for you – can you still be a writer?” “My grandma used to read to me but she died.”
And, as the others file out, the solemn child who stands before me and whispers: “I’m the new kid.”
When I first began writing, I wrote only novels for adults. I couldn’t have imagined that my life would someday include visits to schools where hour by hour, first and second and third and fourth graders sit in criss-cross-applesauce rows on the carpeted library floor, listening. Watching. Thinking.
Why do I do so few school visits? Because kids. Their questions go straight into your heart, and then you carry them around with you forever. We bring kids into this fraught world and they have no idea what awaits them. But there they are, like the child in this poem below, by the brilliant Ed Bok Lee, turning their faces skyward.
A long time ago, I floated down a tunnel toward a light far away. The floating was slow and the sensation around me was warm and soft. I was conscious the entire time, not thinking but feeling, and the feeling was Here we go again. At a certain point, soft bits of metal touched the top and sides of my head. Nothing hurt. Everything was inevitable. What would happen, would happen. This is my memory of being born. (The soft bits of metal part had always confused me, until one day my mother told me I had been a forceps baby, pulled out at the end with metal tongs.) The below excerpt from Kao Kalia Yang’s beautiful, haunting memoir The Latehomecomer makes me remember it all over again, in a different way. From the sky, I would come again.
Alison McGhee 