Poetry Friday: End of Summer

It's the last weekend of summer at our house. My daughter starts school Monday. My son has spent the last two weeks at his school's band camp -- a summer rite of passage for many teens.

Last year's marching band setting up for their show. They were state champs!

I was looking for a marching band poem and came across this piece about another teen summer rite of passage. It's a loose sort of prose poem/haibun about a local summer fair.

The marching band (and pig's feet, rides, tickets) snakes through the poem, but so does something else: a hint of the town's collective racism.

It's important that this theme isn't front and center in the poem, but woven into its fabric more subtly. The poem is anchored in the voice of a child or teen who doesn't quite see beyond the fair's attractions. Instead of stamping the fair with an opinion, the poet allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.

Diorama

By Atsuro Riley

  

  The Blue Hole Summer Fair, set up and spread out like a butterfly pinned down on paper. Twin bright-lit wings, identically shaped (and fenced) and sized.

    This side holds the waffled-tin (and oven-hot) huts of the Home Arts Booths and Contests, the hay-sweet display-cages for the 4-H livestock, the streamer-hung display-stages where girl-beauties twirl and try for queen. There's rosette-luster (and -lusting), and the marching band wearing a hole in Sousa. And (pursed) gaggles and clutches of feather-white neighbor-women, eyeballing us like we're pig's feet in a jar. 

                    I wonder does her boy talk Chinese?

                                      You ever seen that kind of black-headed?

                                                        Blue shine all in it like a crow. 

This other wing (the one I'm back-sneaking, side-slipping, turnstiling into) dips and slopes down to low-lying marsh-mire: whiffs of pluff-mud stink and live gnat-pack poison, carnie-cots and -trailers camped on ooze. They've got (rickety) rides, and tent-shows with stains, and rackety bare-bulbed stalls of Hoop-La Game (RING-A-COKE!) and Rebel Yell and Shoot the Gook Down. Stand here, on this smutch-spot: don't these mirrors show you strange? 

www.howardcountyfair.org

Read the rest of "Diorama" at the Poetry Foundation. 

If you are teaching this poem, I'd recommend high school or advanced middle schoolers. There is a lot to dig into in "Diorama," including the meaning of the title. 

It might also be an interesting piece to pair with a novel like Gordon Parks' The Learning Tree or one of Ray Bradbury's pieces set at a small town fair (like Something Wicked this Way Comes.)

When I taught HS, this was one of my favorite novels in our 9th grade curriculum.

We have a great summer fair in Howard County, Maryland, but I haven't gone in many years. There's plenty of color and excitement at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, which happens each May. 

Enjoy your last days of summer! Be sure to stop by Dori's blog, Dori Reads for more end of summer and back to school poetry. 

Before I sign off, today is our 21st anniversary. Sending gratitude and love to my husband, Rob.