Here are some poems and excerpts from literature to inspire you and your students. Keeping a journal is not about making pretty pictures but a way of seeing more deeply- learning to notice the richness of the world around us, and to help us remember what we have seen.

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

 

A man Lost by a River by Michael Blumenthal

There is a voice inside the body.

There is a voice and a music,
a throbbing, four chambered pear
that wants to be heard. That sits
alone by the river with its mandolin
and its torn coat,  and sings
for whomever will listen
a song that no one wants to hear.

But sometimes, lost,
on his way to somewhere significant,
a man in a long coat, carrying
a briefcase, wanders into the forest.

He hears the voice and the mandolin,
he sees the thrush and the dandelion,
and he feels the mist rise over the river.

And his life is never the same,
For this having been lost –
For having strayed from the path of his routine,
for no good reason.

    
This much I do Remember by Billy Collins

It was after dinner.
You were talking to me across the table
about something or other,
a greyhound you had seen that day
or a song you liked,

and I was looking past you
over your bare shoulder
at the three oranges lying
on the kitchen counter
next to the small electric bean grinder,
which was also orange,
and the orange and white cruets for vinegar and oil.

All of which converged
into a random still life,
so fastened together by the hasp of color,
and so fixed behind the animated
foreground of your
talking and smiling,
gesturing and pouring wine,
and the camber of you shoulders

that I could feel it being painted within me,
brushed on the wall of my skull,
while the tone of your voice
lifted and fell in its flight,
and the three oranges
remained fixed on the counter
the way that stars are said
to be fixed in the universe.

Then all of the moments of the past
began to line up behind that moment
and all of the moments to come
assembled in front of it in a long row,
giving me reason to believe
that this was a moment I had rescued
from millions that rush out of sight
into a darkness behind the eyes.

Even after I have forgotten what year it is,
my middle name,
and the meaning of money,
I will still carry in my pocket
the small coin of that moment,
minted in the kingdom
that we pace through every day.

 

Keeping a Journal by William Stafford

At night it was easy for me with my little candle
to sit late recording what happened that day. Sometimes
rain breathing in from the dark would begin softly
across the roof and then drum wildly for attention.
The candle flame would hunger after each wafting
of air. My pen inscribed thin shadows that leaned
forward and hurried their lines along the wall.

More important than what was recorded, these evenings
deepened my life: they framed every event
or thought and placed it with care by the others.
As time went on, that scribbled wall--even if
it stayed blank--became where everything
recognized itself and passed into meaning.

 

Excerpt from Mara and Dann: An Adventure by Doris Lessing

"…At home there was a game that all the parents played with their children. It was called What Did You See?" Mara was young when she was first called into her father's room one evening, where he sat in his big carved and colored chair. He said to her "And now we are going to play a game. What was the thing you liked best today?" At first she chattered: "I played with my cousin…. I was out with Shera in the garden… I made a stone house". And then he said "Tell me about the house". And she said, "I made a house out of the stones that come from the river bed". And he said "Now, tell me about the stones". And she said "They were mostly smooth stones, but some were sharp and had different shapes." "Tell me what the stones looked like, what color they were, what did they feel like".

And by the time the game ended she knew why some stones were smooth and some sharp and why they were different colors, some cracked, some so small they were almost sand. She knew how rivers rolled stones along and how some of them came from far away. She knew that the river had once been twice as wide as it was now. There seemed no end to what she knew, and yet her father had not told her much, but kept asking questions so she found answers within herself. Every evening, her mother and father would call her in for What Did You See? She loved it. During the day, playing outside or with her toys, alone or with other children, she found herself thinking, Now notice what you are doing so you can tell them tonight what you saw.

She had thought the game did not change, but one evening when she was there, her little brother was first asked What Did You See? And she knew just how much the game had changed for her. Because now it was not just What Did You See, but what were you thinking? What was it that made you think that? Are you sure that thought is true?

When she became seven, not long ago, and it was time for school, she was in a room with about twenty children – all from her family or from the Big Family – and the teacher, her mothers sister, said "And now the game: What did You See?". Most of the children had played the game since they were tiny; but some had not and they were pitied by the ones who had for they did not notice much and were often silent when the others said "I saw" whatever it was. Mara was at first upset that this game was played with so many at once was simpler, more babyish, than when she played it with her parents. It was like going right back to the earliest stages of the game: "what did you see" "I saw a bird" "what kind of bird" "It was black and white and had a yellow beak" "what shape of beak? why do you think the beak is shaped like that?" Then she saw what she was supposed to be understanding. Why did one child see this and the other that? Why did it sometimes need several children to see everything about a stone or a bird or a person?…"