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POETRY, PROSE AND SHORT FICTION FOR CREATIVITY-BASED CURRICULUM GUIDEBOOK ON IMMIGRATION “Just as when I started writing poetry, we’re at a very crucial time in American history and in planetary history…Poetry is a way to bridge, to make bridges from one country to another, one person to another, one time to another.” -Joy Harjo (2019, June 6) Javier Zamora …………………………………………………………………………. 2/290 Naomi Shihab Nye (excerpts from interview with Krista Tippett) ………………..….. 3/291 Justen Ahren (poetry, photos, stories from refugees in Levos, Greece) ………………. 8/296 Joanna Wróblewska (poetry and stories from refugees in Europe) ………………….. 19/307 Elizabeth McKim …………………………………………………………………….. 20/308 Meg Braley …………………………………………………………………………… 21/309 M. Soledad Caballero …………………………………………………………………. 23/311 Elexia Alleyne………………………………………………………………………… 24/312 Camille T. Dungy …………………………………………………………………….. 25/313 Hieu Minh Nguyen …………………………………………………………………… 26/314 Scott Ruescher ……………………………………………………………………….. 27/315 Ifrah Mansour …………………………………………………………………………..30/318 Sally Wen Mao ……………………………………………………………………….. 32/320 Courtesy of Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database Odette Amaranta Vélez Valcárcel ……………………………………………………. 33/321 (Thoughts on Poetic Sensibility) In Spanish and English María Cristina Rojas …………………………………………………………………… 36/324 (thoughts on language and teaching through poetry) Women and Children in Detention Trilogy Nightmares and Dreams: Immigrant Voices from Inside Detention Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………. 37/325 Leaving Home - Guatemala (Narrative in English) …………………………………. 38/326 The Lucky One/ Afortunada – El Salvador (Narrative in English) ………………….. 39/327 The Lucky One/ Afortunada – El Salvador (Play in English) ………………………… 41/329 The Final Goodbye – Honduras (Narrative in English) ………………………………. 43/331 The Final Goodbye – Honduras (Play in English with some Spanish) ………………. 44/333 1 Javier Zamora Courtesy of the author from his book Unaccompanied from: The Book I Made with a Counselor My First Week of School His grandma made the best pupusas, the counselor wrote next to Stick-Figure Abuelita (I’d colored her puffy hair black with a pen). Earlier, Dad in his truck: “always look gringos in the eyes.” Mom: “never tell them everything, but smile, always smile.” A handful of times I’ve opened the book to see running past cacti, from helicopters, running inside detention cells. Next to what might be yucca plants or a dried creek: Javier saw a dead coyote animal, which stank and had flies over it. I keep this book in an old shoebox underneath the bed. She asked in Spanish, I just smiled, didn’t tell her, no animal, I knew that man. Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. His father fled El Salvador when he was a year old; and his mother when he was about to turn five. Both parents' migrations were caused by the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). In 1999, Javier migrated through Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually the Sonoran Desert. Before a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants. His first full-length collection, Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press, September 2017), explores how immigration and the civil war have impacted his family. Zamora holds many fellowships and awards including for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign. See: http://www.javierzamora.net/; http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/from-the-book-i-made; https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/javier-zamora; https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-immigrant-who-crossed-the-border-as-a- child-retraces-his-journey-in-poems & 2 Naomi Shihab Nye The following poems are offered with permission from the poet and referenced in an interview (excerpts below) of Krista Tippett’s conversation with Naomi Shihab Nye courtesy of On Being podcast https://onbeing.org/programs/naomi-shihab-nye-your-life-is-a-poem-mar2018/ Kindness Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend. 3 Two Countries Skin remembers how long the years grow when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel of singleness, feather lost from the tail of a bird, swirling onto a step, swept away by someone who never saw it was a feather. Skin ate, walked, slept by itself, knew how to raise a see-you-later hand. But skin felt it was never seen, never known as a land on the map, nose like a city, hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope. Skin had hope, that's what skin does. Heals over the scarred place, makes a road. Love means you breathe in two countries. And skin remembers — silk, spiny grass, deep in the pocket that is skin's secret own. Even now, when skin is not alone, it remembers being alone and thanks something larger that there are travelers, that people go places larger than themselves. Refugee Not Always (spoken https://onbeing.org/blog/refugee-not-always/) Refugee not always once a confident schoolboy strolling Jerusalem streets He knew the alleyways spoke to stones All his life he would pick up stones and pocket them On some he drew faces What do we say in the wake of one who was always homesick? Are you home now? Is Palestine peaceful in some dimension we can't see? Do Jews and Arabs share the table? Is holy in the middle? Cross That Line 4 Paul Robeson stood on the northern border of the USA and sang into Canada where a vast audience sat on folding chairs waiting to hear him. He sang into Canada. His voice left the USA when his body was not allowed to cross that line. Remind us again, brave friend. What countries may we sing into? What lines should we all be crossing? What songs travel toward us from far away to deepen our days? Below are excerpts of Krista Tippett's conversation with poet Naomi Shihab Nye: (7/28/16) Life is a Poem interview with poet Naomi Shihab Nye https://onbeing.org/programs/naomi-shihab- nye-your-life-is-a-poem/ Naomi Shihab Nye: Very rarely do you hear anyone say they write things down and feel worse. It's an act that helps you, preserves you, energizes you in the very doing of it. Krista Tippett, host: “You are living in a poem.” This is how the poet Naomi Shihab Nye sees the world, and she teaches how this way of being and writing is possible. She has engaged the real-world power of words since her upbringing between her father’s Palestinian homeland and Ferguson, Missouri, near where her American mother grew up. Her father was a refugee journalist, and she carries forward his hopeful passion, his insistence that language must be a way out of cycles of animosity. A poem she wrote, called “Kindness,” is carried around in the pockets and memories of readers around the world. [see Kindness above] … Ms. Tippett: … [W]hat is poetry? What’s poetry’s place? It seems like one of the things you draw out is just noticing, paying a different kind of attention to things that are not quite as apparent to the eye, starting with … “Please Describe How You Became A Writer.” …Ms. Shihab Nye: It’s very short. [laughs] “Please Describe How You Became A Writer” — “Possibly I began writing as a refuge from our insulting first-grade textbook. Come, Jane, come. Look, Dick, look. Were there ever duller people in the world? You had to tell them to look at things? Why weren’t they looking to begin with?” [see Two Countries above] 5 … Ms. Shihab Nye: Last week, I was in a classroom in Austin, Texas, where a girl who was apparently going through a really rough spell at home wrote a poem that was definitely tragic and comic, both, about — everybody was yelling at her in the poem, from all directions. She was just kind of suffering in her home place and trying to find peace, trying to find a place to do her homework. But she wrote this in such a compelling way that when she read it — and read it with gusto and joy; there was such joyousness in her voice, even though she was describing something that sounded awful — when she finished, the girls in her classroom just broke into wild applause. And I saw her face. She lit up. And she said, "Man, I feel better." …[T]his is such a graphic example of putting words on the page. That feeling of being connected to someone else, when you allow yourself to be very particular, is another mystery of writing.

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