Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part L)

LUCHA, an agency that hosted offsited classrooms in East Harlem, published a Waterways magazine in the autumn of 1986.

The issue led off with A Cry for Help by Jeanette:

A voice cried from a dark alley. The echoes that were heard were like from a deep valley.

The woman screamed and screamed. The neighbors turned on their music so they could ignore the screams.

That was followed by Lisa’s remembrance, Friend, which began --

A friend of mine is dead.
Someone took away his life.

Edward wrote a variation to Robert Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay --

Life is as good as gold,
but somewhere along the road
you’ll find out one day you will croak.
If only I could live forever,
I’d be happy knowing I won’t die - never.
But there will be a day along the way...
Nothing gold can stay.

And Angel wrote Love Can Never Stay --

Love is like gold,
it will never get old.
For some of us are lucky,
but others are not.
Love like a flower
is here today
and gone in an hour.
Love is like the seasons.
There will never be a reason
why love can never stay.

Students wrote poems about their fathers modeled on Theodore Roethke’s Pappa’s Waltz and Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays. Jacqueline wrote:

He’s kind
and cares for us
to have all the things we need.
If I get sick
he’ll take me to the hospital
if my mother can’t.
He doesn’t like to go away
and leave us.
He doesn’t treat us bad.

Amado wrote The Unknown Father

How does it feel having a father?
Do you grow up manly or roughly?
Do you learn right from wrong
Forcefully or peacefully?
I don’t know why, maybe
Because I was raised softly.
How does it feel having a father?

In My Father Antoine wrote --

My father was around when I was a little boy. I remember a few things about him.

There are some things that I know about him, but they’re personal. I love him in my own way. He was with me for such a little time when I was young.

When the years went by he was nowhere around me or my family. He doesn’t call me on holidays or on my birthday. It doesn’t matter. I do care because he is my father, but it doesn’t matter.