by Gene Fehler
The Royals winning a game like that over the Yankees made me think that anything is possible. Maybe it was a sign. Maybe from this time on everything will be all right. Maybe, just maybe, Jesus heard my prayer.
And if that wasn’t a sign, I got another one when I first got to class today. Allison gave me a poem. She said, “Here’s a poem I wrote this weekend. I thought you might want to see it.”
The title was “Prayer.”
Splashed against December’s sky is snow.
The harsh wind peppersit
against my frozen face; and though
I shiver just a tiny bit, I know
that winter’s bleakest rage
cannot begin to match the chill
of frozen souls, of my soul
in that icy place I lived
before I knelt to pray.
The snow that whips my wind-raw face
is warmer still than sunlit cold
of every godless yesterday.
I read the poem over and over. What made me feel just a little discouraged was knowing how much better Allison is than I am at writing poetry. What made me feel good was the poem’s message. It seemed to be saying that prayer can help. Oh, I hope so, I thought. I hope so. I want my frozen soul to thaw. I do.
“Okay,” Mr. Gallagher says. “To start out, we’re going to try something new today. I’m going to have you pair up with somebody else and write some poems together. There are different ways this can work.”
I look over at Allison. She points at me and then back at herself. She mouths the words, “You and me.”
“One way to do this is for each of you to write your own poem,” Mr. Gallagher says. “If you do, then you help each other out with the revision. Go over each poem word by word, line by line. What can be added? Taken out? What words can be changed?” He pauses. He holds his hands in front of him. Palms out. “But we’re not going to do that right now.”
He picks up a stack of note cards. “Another thing we could do is give each pair of poets some note cards. Each of the cards has a word on the back, words like ‘bird,’ ‘snow,’ ‘mountain,’ ‘water,’ and so on. You’ll use that word to give you an idea for your poem.” He spreads his palms again. “But we’re not going to do that yet, either.”
“The suspense is killing me,” Adrian Barrow says. He’s kind of the class clown, except he writes really good poems.
“I’m sure you’ll survive,” Mr. Gallagher says with a smile. “Now there’s another way to approach your poem. Each partnership can work on a single poem. Each of you can contribute ideas, lines, images to it. You can build the poem together.”
“But we’re not going to do that either, I bet,” Adrian says.
“You’ve got me pegged,” Mr. Gallagher says. “What we’re going to do is have a little challenge. I’m going to give you a subject to write about. We’ll be able to take a look at all the different ways each of the groups writes about the same subject. It’s a subject that will be wide-open. It’s limited only by your imagination. The subject is, drum roll please…”
“Oh, the suspense!” Adrian says.
“…months of the year,” Mr. Gallagher says.
“Which month?” Kerry Wilson asks.
“Any month,” Mr. Gallagher says. “Every month, if you’d like.”
“How long should it be?” Kerry asks.
“As long as it needs to be,” Mr. Gallagher says. “Just like most of your other poems.”
Allison and I sit at a corner table and start to brainstorm. We go through each of the twelve months. We think of things that have happened to us in each of the months. We list things we associate with each of the months. Like for January: snowball fights, ice-skating, school being cancelled, basketball games, colds. Or April: blossoms, green grass, Easter, baseball season, robins, spring rains, spring breezes.
After half an hour we still haven’t started our poem, but we have a page full of ideas for dozens of poems. Which isn’t all bad, I guess. Mr. Gallagher keeps telling us that the hardest part of writing poems is coming up with ideas.
We have plenty of those.
Mr. Gallagher keeps us busy all day. There’s no time to think of anything but poetry. By the time school’s out and I meet Ginny at the bus, Allison and I have completed the first draft of our month poem and I’ve written four new poems of my own.
It’s been my best day of writing in three weeks. Maybe I’ll have something good enough to read on Friday night after all.
Fifteen
ginny’s news
Mama and Dad both went to work today, so I’m at Ginny’s when the phone rings. The second she’s done talking she starts squealing and jumping up and down.
“I got it! I got the part!”
I know without her saying any more just what she’s talking about. She’s been in enough plays you’d think she wouldn’t be this excited. But I guess if I kept getting game-winning base hits I’d probably be just as excited as I was the first time. Not that I ever expect to get another game-winning hit.
“The lead?” I say. “Did you actually get…”
“I did! I did! I get to play Annie!”
Annie is a musical about a girl who grows up in an orphanage run by a mean woman. She’s about ten or eleven when she gets picked to spend the Christmas holidays at the mansion of Daddy Warbucks, who I guess was the richest man in the United States. The play takes place a long time ago, like the 1930s or ‘40s. It’s a whole new world for Annie because she’s never had anything. Not only that, she’s treated like a princess when she’s at Daddy Warbucks’ mansion, while the woman who runs the orphanage treated all the girls like slaves. It’s a really neat play. I know Ginny will be great as Annie.
She auditioned at the Children’s Theater for the part a few days after we started at Valley Lakes School. She got a callback last week to come and read for the part again. She said she knows of at least a dozen girls who got callbacks. She said a lot of the others who didn’t get picked to play Annie will probably get to play some of the other orphans.
Annie has curly red hair and gets to sing a lot of solos. Ginny doesn’t have red hair. I guess she’ll have to wear a wig. The hair’s not important, though. What’s important is that she’s a great actress and she can sing. I get goosebumps when she belts out songs like “Tomorrow” and “It’s a Hard Knock Life.” I could listen to her all day.
She started practicing for the audition a few weeks ago. I’ve watched the movie with her five or six times, and I know she’s watched it by herself a bunch. She’s been practicing Annie’s songs, too. If you ask me, I think she sounds just as good as the girl who plays Annie in the movie.
I’m really happy for her, but I’m sad, too. Rehearsals start next week. She said they’ll be rehearsing three or four nights a week most of the summer to get ready for the September performances. That means I won’t see her nearly as much. And there’s no chance now of her playing baseball this summer. First of all, she won’t have time. Secondly, she’d have a hard time singing with a puffed-up lip if she got hit in the face with a baseball again.
But it’ll be so much fun seeing her up on stage.
“Sing ‘Tomorrow’ for me,” I say.
“Now?”
“Will you? Please?”
“Are you sure?”
“I really want to hear it.”
“Really?”
“Really, truly.”
So she does.
And I get goosebumps all over.
Sixteen
poem prayers
When Ginny first said she was going to audition for Annie, I’d never seen the movie. Even when we started watching it, I never felt bad for Annie, not even when she was in the orphanage. I mean, the movie is mostly funny. Even though she didn’t have any parents and she was treated bad, I never thought about the bad things.
After I found out about Mama’s cancer, I started to see the movie in a different way. I know it’s only a made-up story, but still, n
one of the girls had parents. Some of them, like Annie, never knew their parents. But some of them must have known their mama. Now there they are, without any family except the other girls in the orphanage.
If God won’t cure Mama’s cancer, I’ll at least have Dad and Ken. I won’t be alone. I won’t be sent to an orphanage. But maybe God won’t be that mean. He wouldn’t. He has to save her. Maybe if I pray harder. Maybe if I can just find the right words, I can convince God to take away her cancer and make her well again.
I take out my notebook. I try to think of what I can say to God to make him listen. I know I don’t really have the right to expect him to listen to me. If I were Allison, with her faith, maybe he would.
I start to write. I want it to be a prayer, but it seems to be taking the shape of a poem.
God, are you there?
I just don’t see you anywhere.
God, oh God, why don’t you care?
What can I do to make you see
Just how much Mama means to me.
No, that’s not right. That’s not what I mean to say. Don’t do it for me, God. Do it for Mama. I’m not important. She is.
When Mr. Stone, the poet, came to my school, he told us to never throw away anything we write. But I take the page from my notebook and crumple it up. I toss it in the waste basket. What I wrote was dumb. It was selfish. Not only that, I kind of sounded like Dr. Seuss with his silly rhymes. I can’t be silly when I ask God for help.
Besides, when I said he didn’t care, that probably made him mad. It won’t help Mama if I make God mad. I start to write.
God, I know you’ll do all you can
To make my mama well again.
I cross out the “again.” This prayer will be better if it doesn’t rhyme. I read it over. I don’t like either line. I scribble them out and try again.
God, I know you are good.
I know you can do anything.
It’s so easy for you to just reach down
and take the cancer from Mama’s body.
Why won’t you do that?
I rip the paper from my notebook and ball it up and slam it down into the wastebasket. I can’t stop the sobs. I fall onto my bed and bury my face in my pillow. Why can’t I do it? Why can’t I find the right words? I’m probably just making things worse by trying to convince God to help Mama. He hears words all the time from people who really know how to pray, who aren’t selfish.
Please God. Please don’t make Mama suffer because of my foolish words. She needs your help. She deserves your help.
Suddenly I’m biting my lower lip so hard it hurts. If I make it bleed maybe that will get God’s attention. Maybe he’ll realize I really care.
But I start to sob again. Because I realize that God has probably already stopped listening.
Seventeen
valley lakes program
The auditorium is packed for our program. It’s mostly the families of the more than sixty of us who decided to spend three weeks of our summer vacation in the classroom again. The reason for the program is to show the parents what their talented kids have created during the three weeks. “Talented” isn’t my word; it’s what the director of Valley Lakes says when he talks to the audience at the start of the program.
I wish it were true. I don’t feel especially talented. The worst thing is that in a few minutes I’ll have to stand up in front of an auditorium full of people and read some of my poems. My stomach is turning somersaults just thinking about it.
Most of us have to perform on stage. The visual arts kids are the only ones who don’t. Their art work is in display in the lobby for everybody to look at when they come and go out after the program is over. All the artists have to do is stand beside their work and talk about it if anybody has questions. And of course get their picture taken alongside their work by somebody in their family.
I’ve been backstage with the rest of my class while the vocal and dance classes went on. It’s given me time to get even more nervous.
My class all walks out on stage. We all have to be on stage together while each of us goes up to the microphone to read our poems.
My hands are shaking when I get to the microphone, but I take a deep breath and feel a little better. I manage to get through my first poem okay. It’s a tennis poem, “World Class Lob.”
My opponent’s lob shot
Played with the sun.
It finally turned and sped away,
Back toward where I waited
To punish the ball
For taking so long to arrive.
The sun saw the danger,
rumbled from the sky,
Stuck its blinding rays in my eyes,
Letting the ball land
Softly, happy – safe
From my waiting overhead smash.
I wrote that poem the first week. Most of what I wrote the last week rhymed. We’d spent two whole days of class this week writing nothing but silly poems, kind of like what Shel Silverstein writes. That was the assignment. Mr. Gallagher said, “Some people think that silly poems are harder to write than serious ones, so here’s my challenge: I want you to spend the next two days writing only silly poems. If you can try ten different poem ideas and two of them are good, you’re ahead of the game.”
I was glad he gave us that assignment. If I wrote what I was really feeling, I’d end up with poems too depressing to read, or else poems so personal I wouldn’t dare read them.
None of my silly poems are anywhere near as good as Silverstein’s, but I picked out three of them to read anyway, mostly because Mr. Gallagher said he liked them. He said I have a good ear for rhythm. I don’t know if that’s true, but it made me feel good when he said it.
When I read, I know I read faster than I should. It’s just that I’m nervous and want to finish as soon as possible.
Baking Watermelon
I baked a watermelon cake
With green rind and black seeds.
I used some sand for icing;
For candles I used weeds.
It tasted far too gritty,
And, sad to say, too dry.
I guess next time I’ll try to bake
A watermelon pie.
Friday Is My Day
Friday is my day to do what I like,
And what I like best is to ride on my bike,
To ride across recess, to ride down the hall,
To ride in my classroom and laugh at them all.
They are sitting there workingfor teachers who yell
From the morning announcementstil the day’s final bell.
My classmates just sit there, all writing a poem,
So I zoom out the door and I ride my bike home.
Sally, Eating a Bar of
Chocolate in Sunday School
The chocolate bar she tried to eat
Had melted in the summer heat.
The chocolate dripped off Sally’s nose
And landed on her best church clothes.
Sally’s favorite yellow dress
Was now a brown and gooey mess.
Some chocolate fell with a kerplop
And formed a heart-shaped chocolate drop
On one of Sally’s new, white shoes.
The moral’s this: if you should choose
To ever eat a chocolate bar,
Remember when and where you are.
I actually wrote that last one for Allison, but I changed her name because Mr. Gallagher said we shouldn’t use the names of real people in our poems, because it might embarrass them or make them feel bad (even though the poem isn’t true). It could have happened, though. Allison actually was eating a candy bar one day before Sunday School. She had on a really pretty dress. I kept thinking, “I hope she’s careful not to get chocolate on her dress.” She didn’t, but she could have.
Mr. Gallagher told us more than once, “Poems aren’t always ‘what is.’ Most of the time they’re ‘what might be,’ or ‘what could be.’”
Allison’s th
e last one in our class to read. I love her poems. I think they say a lot about the kind of person she is. Whether she’s writing serious poems or silly ones, most of them are about God or Jesus or church or prayer.
She starts out with “God, Sticking Up For My Brother.”
I saw God sitting in a tree.
“It’s only an owl,” my brother said.
“Just listen to the sound.”
It sure sounded like God to me.
Then in the middle of the night
I awoke to see God
in the shadows near my window.
“Why,” I asked Him, “aren’t you
still in the tree where I saw you
when I was in the yard with my brother?”
“I wasn’t in that tree,” God told me.
“That was an owl. Even brothers,”
God said, “are not wrong all the time.”
Her next one is “Samson.” Allison sure knows more about the Bible than I do.
Talk about being hoodwinked! He never did
see the truth until that final moment, chained
like a wild animal to be spit on by Philistines.
God could have given up on him; no one
would have blamed Him, gullible and ungodly
as Samson was, murderer of thirty men at Ashkelon,
of a thousand at Lehi. The woman of Timnath and
Delilah both saw the human Samson, Samson the weak.
But Samson, at the end, learned in time that prayer,
not hair, was the source of miraculous strength.