CURRENT ISSUE | Public School Poetry

Issue #5, September 2025

David Ward

Our featured photograph for this issue was taken at an observation deck over Niagara Falls. I find myself watching as the weather balloon floats in the mist, thinking about
what it means to watch. Watching not only means to look attentively, but also, as the classic Merriam Webster dictionary reminds us, “to keep under careful, protective, or
secret observation.” The notion that to watch is also to keep somehow feels singularly human. It is also one of our best traits. What do we see that we also take care of and
hold close: children, gardens, our beloved pets, dare say, each other? “Watch out,” we say, when a baseball flies toward the crowd. “Watch where you are going,” on the path,
the road, the journey.

Poetry demands that we become acute, sometimes secret observers of our surroundings. The craft shares these traits with the stewardship of teaching. To be a master teacher is to be always fully aware of the environment of a classroom, all its citizens. What is instruction without first, watchfulness? It is one of the first lessons learned in public school. Children teach us to be observers, their eyes clear and unmarred by experience. But adults? Sometimes we are too busy, distracted, dejected by our complicated lives.

Poetry can help us see, marvel, and care about our world. It is a simple conceit, that watching can become language, that we can use words to delight in the earth and each other. We see this unfolding in Issue #5. As always, our contributors created essays responding to each other’s work without knowing whose work they were responding to. Watch as their care-filled engagement unfolds across these pages. And watch these poems: knee hanging and cold swimming, wolf staring and night walking, base running and vole hunting, stone holding and needle threading, ladder climbing and body shifting.

-- Ellen Stone, Vice-Principal

Contents & Contributors

Carrie Strand Tebeau

Wolf Day

Five-Paragraph Essay by Damon Pham

Damon Pham

Soft

Spectacular

Anchor

Five-Paragraph Essay by Teresa Scollon

Jayce Russell

Semi-Autonomous Zone