The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

Facing fears poem

/ Fran Haley / 3 Comments

National Poetry Month has ended, and I miss it. While I may not be posting every day for a while, I continue to write.

The last prompt on Ethical ELA’s #VerseLove was on fear. Articulating it, facing it…perhaps conquering it.

This got me thinking how facing a thing for what it really is = the first step in conquering. There’s a lot of extreme anxiety in the world today. A lot of hatred. Sometimes we just don’t see things for what they are…including our own thoughts.

And so this poem was born.

Courage, peace, and wellness to you, Friends. Whatever it is…you can overcome.

My Fear Haiku

I once read a book
where people’s eyes turned inward.
They died from seeing

what’s inside their minds.
I trembled to take a look
at what lurks in mine.

Now I remember
what Granddaddy once told me
regarding black snakes:

don’t ever kill them.
See, black snakes eat rats and mice;
they’re good. We need them.

I think fear’s like that
snaking along, with purpose
something quite useful

so I never try
to kill it. Let it consume
the uglier parts

of my thoughts, and go its way
leaving me with a clean peace
and a better mind

so that all I fear,
in the end, is forgetting
memories of love.

Path of peace. The view after turning off the highway to visit my grandparents. The house is my grandmother’s homeplace, where she and her eight siblings were born in the early 1900s. Just ahead, around the bend on the left, stood my grandparents’ home where my dad and his sisters grew up in the 1940s-50s, and where I spent many childhood summers.

My safest haven on Earth. Snakes and all.

Love, life lessons, legacy, and memories live on.

Shine

/ Fran Haley / 4 Comments

born-to-shine

 

This is the cover of my mentor text notebook, housing the writing I’ve done with and for children across grade levels.

I believe that every child is a writer, because every child has a story. Every child has feelings and ideas. The writing teacher simply shows how to tap into these feelings and ideas, to give voice to them, to organize them, so that the mind and heart of the writer impacts readers.

Writing is about the human experience: We are all born to shine.

We shine through our fears, our losses.

We shine beyond the choices we make and the choices of others, beyond the things done to us and the things we have done.

We shine no less in our failures than in our successes; in fact, in learning and pressing on, we shine the brighter.

We shine in knowing what to hold onto and what to let go.

We shine when we harness anger before it burns away all that’s of value within us.

We shine by leaving footprints of hope for others to follow, for the human heart runs empty on despair.

We are ALL born to shine. Whether or not we do is up to us.

Reflect:  In the book The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip, 1974, a mysterious creature had the power to turn people’s eyes around to see inside their minds; they died from what they saw there. Writer, know thyself. Look deep within. You will be surprised by what you discover – the beautiful and the not. Write – and shine.