This morning as I walked from my car to the office, I marveled over the songs of cardinals beginning to feel the first stirrings of spring; now, though, I'm sitting in a dim, cave-like basement classroom where the only sound is the tap-tap-tap of fingers on keyboards and the occasional susurrus of pages being turned. My first-year students are writing in-class midterm essays and by the looks of them, they are working pretty hard. I hope they're paying more attention than the student who wrote in a draft the other day that we all need to learn more about "the history of writhing," because the massive load of student writing I'm facing this week has already inspired writhing enough.
Overwhelmed by the unending pages of student prose I'm reading, I feel the need for concision, precision, and poise. Let's cut out the excess and write some haiku!
Above, birds call for
spring; below, fingers tap out
strings of student prose.
I write, you write, he,
she, or it writes; they write, I
read, nobody writhes.
Read the prompt! Follow
directions! My voice, ignored,
bleats its futile hope.
Outside, the birds still
sing on high, releasing spring
stories over air.
That's it for me. Why don't you give it a try?
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