Mead Students Share Thoughts In Poetry At Auntie’s Reading

In his 17 years, David Hind has never been online and hasn’t traveled out of the country. A day at Mead High School is enough material for the young poet.

Spaghetti on the cafeteria walls inspired one poem. He sees the heave and cry of teen emotions as high drama.

“I just can’t write about trees blowing in the wind and stuff,” said Hind, a blond junior dressed in black jeans and a smudged white T-shirt.

Of course, people thought he was homosexual when he “came out” as a poet. “I’m not,” he says, quickly and emphatically.

His peers in the Mead High creative writing program say they are expected to be Bauhaus cliche - black turtle necks and chain smokers. They play tennis and trombone.

And they write about suggestive advertising and ocean and world problems and hunting.

More than 140 people - mostly high school kids - came to hear the young Mead poets read at Auntie’s Bookstore last Friday. The poems, in some ways, fit the cliche: brooding and depressing, in a charming Holden Caufield way. A young Jewish man read a poem about his ethnicity, followed by a teen in drug rehab, followed by an exchange student from the Czech Republic.

“It’s all pretty depressing, but I guess that’s a good reflection of what teenagers are thinking about,” said Maxine Bayley, a 17 year-old senior who led the reading.

The poetry reading was organized by teacher Georgia Toppe, who, for more than six years, has built the program into a reputable incubator for creative writers.

In 1991, the program was honored for its contribution to poetry in Washington, the first and only time a high school has been singled out. Writers Sherman Alexie, Heather McHugh and Stephen Lyons have talked to the students.

Toppe encourages the students to take risks, but also teaches the students restraint.

“I believe with my whole being that the real news, the news that matters, we do find in poems,” said Toppe, who last year took off a semester to write. “But it’s not new news. It’s forever news, the individual journeys that we each alone paradoxically, painfully and wonderfully share.”

Here’s a sampling of some poems read Friday:

Pretty Pill

The flush limp babies lie curled

in mamma’s good china bowl.

Milk flows blue

as the blue gothic figures

in their eyes.

I know the message of angels;

everyone here is high.

But it’s your heart that’s burnt.

Mine has healed.

We are separated

by a row of headstones,

my hot-salt belly

a flowering mushroom.

But crack me open.

Pour me out.

I’m a little she-pot.

Here is my handle.

Here is my naked mouth

sapless

and open on the first six days,

closed for the Sabbath.

- peggy wilson (a pen name for Rachelle Sorger)

China Doll

They stuck me together with glue,

chained my ceramic wrists and ankles

with murky yellow goo.

With a paintbrush they streaked my eyes,

lining my irises blue,

dulling my porcelain pupils

with the mistakes they do.

My nose, lost in a crumble of dust,

once split my face in two -

now, forever rough and dull

without their terrible glue.

- Sami Sciuchetti

In My Backyard

In my backyard,

over the chain-link fence speckled with rust,

through tunnels made by fallen pines,

Robin’s evaded the heat.

With the Red Ryder Daisy Gun in my left hand,

and the B-B’s in my right,

I stalked the Robin’s sanctuary.

Then I saw her,

perched high on a fat limb,

staring proudly into my sites,

and I pulled the trigger.

She swooped away in a plume of feathers,

changing directions,

back, and back again

to the bed of pine needles

that would be her grave.

Brick-colored wings,

turned copper at the tips,

draped over miniature claws.

Droplets of blood pulsated from her left eye,

punch-drunk and twitching,

and soaked up her feathers.

- Jim Davis

Laundromat

1

Set the world on spin.

Separate the colors;

red bleeds.

Add a caustic detergent.

Cleanse.

2

Bosnia.

3

Aryan silk

was spun by worms.

4

Hate is a shampoo castle

piled on the mud-streaked head of a child;

soap blinds the eyes.

- Colleen Childs

Finch students perform

Expect a run on blank video tapes in Northwest Spokane today.

More than 200 Finch Elementary students are singing and dancing through a extravaganza cute-fest tonight titled “Finch on Broadway.”

You’ve got first-graders and kindergartners doing “Over the Rainbow” and lines of square dancers. And their parents will take the lime-green gabardine out of the closet and onto the stage for a (painful?) flashback disco number.

“Finch on Broadway” will be at Shadle Park High auditorium at 7 p.m. It’s free, but a donation is requested. For more information call Joan Hamilton at 353-4458.

, DataTimes MEMO: Education Notebook is a regular feature of the North Side Voice. If you have news about an interesting program or activity at a North Side school or about the achievements of North Side students, teachers or school staff, please let us know. Deadline is Monday. Write: Jonathan Martin, Education Notebook, North Side Voice, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210. E-mail: jonathanm@spokesman.com. Call: 459-5484. Fax: 459-5482.