Teacher Guide
Be cypress, pig-frog, red drum, be pipistrelle bat.
Spell the blue membrane between water and earth.
Conjure Sargasso Sea under your breath.
Now be spartina, now egret, be now rice-rat.
Winged, rooted, and gilled, set your charges travelling.
Feed your nerves on instinct, trusting whatever
is at hand; forget what you’ve been taught. Gather
your shadows; ponder their nutritious wavelengths.
Spend the year earth-bound, tangled—under
the influence of two moons, one for each eye.
Let epithet and praise float clean away;
let soil and rain make themselves into thunder
in this eat-or-be-eaten year. Now, let the mess
of shapes and colors explode, now coalesce.
© 2010 Katherine Williams
The creatures in this Shakespearean sonnet are all native to South Carolina. Other images and terms come from autobiographical notes jotted down by poet and artist Kit Loney. Sonnets are good for expressing big ideas in little boxes. I thought Kit’s notes would make a good sonnet because of the contradictions a proper artist undertakes trying to teach middle schoolers in the South something about the history of Western ideas.
The author gratefully acknowledges publication of “Teacher Guide” in American Poetry Journal, J.P. Dancing Bear, Ed. Aptos, CA (2005)
