subsonic love poems

Gabe, Jessie's best friend and "homie for life" went into hoodie-pulled-over-his-eyes, super-sad-and-shut-down mode during recess today and made me cry real tears for a few minutes, too. It is quite sad for all of us to lose one of the brightest lights of our classroom. I've been carrying around a little orange orangutan stuffed monkey which I refer to as "The Spirit of Good Jessie". This monkey finished Jessie's science project, sat in his chair for math, and gently slapped the cheeks of lots and lots of kids all day. There's nothing wrong with using my imagination to cope for a few more days. But I have to lose the monkey crutch next week: gotta be half as brave and strong as my little grandbaby homie hero was for his last month with us. And he was extremely brave and strong.

The thing about feeling so broken is that it opens me up, somehow. I don't really know how to explain this opening up of my heart accurately. It's as if a damaging earth quake shakes my steady normal world and the fissures, fault lines, and pain remind me that I'm a very fragile human, and that I'm walking around, every day, among lots and lots of little fellow fragile humans. Somehow my crumbly, broken spirit is better able to hear the whale songs of comfort that the universe is singing through the voices of all the Washington kids and I'm also able to sense the subsonic poems of love that are still the fabric of my classroom.