Friday, August 31, 2007

Backpack: A Back to School Poem


On Monday in her Poetry Stretch post, Tricia of the Miss Rumphius Effect asked her blog readers to attempt writing a list poem. Here is a list poem I wrote last September. I just made a few changes to it this week.


BACKPACK
by Elaine Magliaro


What’s in my backpack?

Hmm…let’s see:

a tunafish sandwich,

raspberry tea,

an apple for the teacher…

and one for me,


a pair of scissors,

a stick of glue,

washable crayons…

and markers, too—

three sharp pencils

my Winnie Pooh


a bright red folder,

a paper pad,

a calculator to help me add…

and

a little love note from my dad!



The Poetry Friday Roundup is at Mentor Texts & More this week.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

What fun, Elaine. It reminds me of Junior, who has a new backpack. (And who said this week, "Third grade rocks.")

jama said...

This is sweet, with the true voice of childhood. Thanks so much for sharing it.

Elaine Magliaro said...

Susan,

In my thirty-one years as an elementary school teacher, I taught second and third grades--and loved them both. My husband really used to write little love notes to my daughter and put them in her lunchbox when she was young.


Jama,

Thanks. I had hoped to capture the voice of a young child in the poem. I kept hearing my daughter saying the lines in my head--the way she would have said them when she was in kindergarten or first grade.

Sara said...

Very nice. Wouldn't it be fun to see what's in the backpack several months later, too? I know that my daughter's backpack always started out like this one, and then ended up filled with wadded up pages of homework and an old banana. But I bet the love note would still be in there!

Elaine Magliaro said...

Sara,

When my daughter Sara was young, it was really a good thing she attended the school where I taught. Otherwise, I might never have known what was going on. She often shoved school notices into the dark depths of her backpack where they got sucked into a black hole...never to be seen by her dad and me.

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