DAY 2 of Colleen’s KISS Challenge -BACK TO SCHOOL – Post a poem, pic, meme, video or memory related to “going back to school.”
I have lots of wonderful memories of “going back to school” in the olden days when I was a kid growing up in Western Maryland. However, we had no rituals of taking pictures on the first day of school to document our journey. Back in the 1990’s with my own children, computers were quite basic, and we didn’t have social media yet to document “back to school” posts. I would have to search far back into history, and dig deep into old photo albums to find those pictures.
In the 2000’s after my son went off to Florida State and my daughter was in her final high school years, I turned back to poetry writing as a way to express myself and deal with the loneliness of my children leaving the nest. And it was 17 years ago that I wrote this double etheree about how much schools had changed. I had forgotten all about this poem, until I happened to stumble upon it in my “Picture Poems” folder on my desktop.
This picture poem reflects my own photography of “The Little Red School House” at Van Hoosen Farms in Rochester, Michgian, a beautiful historic property near where my in-laws used to live. On our frequent visits to Michigan in winters and summer, we always made a point to stop by the old manor home by Stony Creek, with the little red schoolhouse on its property.
Schoolhouses
Red
schoolhouse
white pine doors
peeling, chipped paint
casts long dark shadows
across pale crystal fields
of pristine, fresh fallen snow
old time haven for learning
boarded up, silent and abandoned
today’s students learn in massive classrooms
jostling down halls of gleaming blue glass
they disconnect from reality
plugged into their virtual lives
instant gratification
their adrenaline rush
history is scoffed
no cares for their
ancestors’
simple
past
Colleen Keller Breuning
August 15, 2008
Colleen Keller Breuning 