How many to go?
This is one of the many, many, many poems that students can select from to memorize and recite to participate in Poetry Out Loud. Tomorrow’s blog post will provide information on the Maine Poetry Out Loud program and information on attending on one of the Maine Arts Commission upcoming Poetry Out Loud events.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.
I like the domesticity of addition—
add two cups of milk and stir—
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.
And multiplication’s school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.
Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else’s
garden now.
There’s an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.
And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.
Three boys beyond their mother’s call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn’t anywhere you look.
-
Mary Cornish, “Numbers” from Red Studio. Copyright © 2007 by Mary Cornish. Reprinted by permission of Oberlin College Press.
-
Source: Red Studio (Oberlin College Press, 2007)
Poetry Out Loud is organized nationally by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation and administered at the state level by the Maine Arts Commission. It begins in Maine’s schools where school champions are selected to compete in two regional finals at which ten students are ultimately selected to recite at the state finals. One student, the state champion, moves on from the state finals to represent Maine at the national finals in Washington D.C., where students from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico will compete for a total of $50,000 in awards and school stipends for the purchase of poetry books.
me arts ed 