D is for Dust

It took me a long time to settle on a topic today. All of the "d" words I could think of were, well, depressing. It's the end of marking period; I have deadlines looming; my senses feel dulled by lack of rest and lingering illness.

The best I could come up with was "day" or "daylight." But even then, I couldn't quite make "day" coherent beyond something cliche like "I like that it's lighter now. I miss the daylight when winter takes hold."

Then I remembered this:


Shake the dust from Anis Mojgani on Vimeo.

Before last weekend, I had never heard that poem before. But Penny Kittle introduced it to me and to all of the educators who gathered at The Northern Virginia Writing Project's Language and Learning Conference. Penny used it to inspire us to write, inviting us to grab a line, an image, an idea, a cadence from Mojagni's poem and play. She told us to write fast, faster than the censor inside of us who would silence us.

So, I did.

For 3 minutes, I wrote.

Then, she invited us later to go back to that writing, to play with it, to craft it, to see what happened.

So, I did.

And in the spirit of "Don't get it right, just get it written" the moral of James Thurber' s "The Sheep in Wolf's Clothing," I decided to share that draft here.

Shake the dust. 

It’s for me to outrun the censor who would silence my voice. Shake the dust from my feet and fly on the wings of the words on the page--wings from something grounded. Ground up trees, the ground up graphite from a pencil, make marks on the page that let me know the ground beneath my feet and yet leave me with the wings to fly and shake of the dust I must shake off and leave behind. 

 Shake the dust. 

It’s for the student who fears being heard, who so quietly exists on the margin of discovery, but fears to be seen. To cause a scene would be unseemly. She covers her mouth when she smiles and looks away from my eyes. Her I’s are not strong enough to withstand the looks of her peers who look more like me than like her. Shake the dust and meet us halfway. We won’t give that half away to anyone who will cause it harm. Spread your arms and shake the dust.