…you must
Be the thing you see.
— from “To Look at Any Thing,” by John Moffett
Scholastic book order day in Mrs. Rader’s sixth-grade English class was my favorite. Once, I thumbed through the newsprint leaflet and selected a poetry anthology called Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle.
When I became an English teacher, I got my hands on the bright yellow hardback edition that’s sitting here beside me as I write. I’ve read it so often, the binding is creased, and the book opens automatically to John Moffit’s poem, “To Look at Any Thing.”
I assigned this poem for the first time to an eighth-grade class of sullen farm boys, doomed to summer school. I don’t remember their reaction, but I’m sure I read the poem aloud, earnestly, as I have every single year to high school, undergraduate, and graduate students; teachers in professional development workshops; and the occasional heartsick friend. Like a slippery trout, the poem makes its way back through fast-moving waters to be caught and released again and again.
There will never be a year of teaching–or a day in my life–when I do not need to “enter in / To the small silences between / The leaves /…And touch the very peace / They issue from.”
Yet every time I read this poem, it catches me by surprise. I stop barreling through my life long enough to pause and look out the window. I breathe. I wonder what the thing is that I must be.
Cindy O’Donnell-Allen
When I was 17, my high school English teacher told me I was a writer. He knew I would be a teacher before I did. Now, I’m a professor in the English Department at Colorado State University (CSU), where I also direct the CSU Writing Project. I was a high school English teacher for eleven heartbreakingly and gloriously unpredictable years.
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