​Unable to get out of my pajamas from grief and fear about the fires devastating Santa Rosa where I live, and temporarily dislocated in San Francisco, I volunteered a poetry class at an elementary school where I had done a residency in the past. I knew the only place to feel some sort of hope was with children being creative.
            I introduced myself to the class of about thirty children as a poet-teacher who had taught at their school in the past. I told them I had come to their classroom because, like a lot of people, I felt upset about the fires up north, which most of them had heard about. “I love your school and I knew it would cheer me up to see you.”
            After a brief discussion of their experiences of bullying, on the request of the school librarian who had arranged for my session and a hot topic in contemporary schools, I led them through the creation of a collective poem. They were then instructed to write their own poems, choosing whether they wanted to work in pairs or by themselves.
            One little boy got out of his seat and wandered off to the side of the room. He looked out of whack, fed up, and frustrated.
            “I’m bored,” he said, refusing to look at me when I asked what was wrong.
            “You don’t want to write about bullies?” I said.
            “I hate poetry,” he said, scowling.
            “Why don’t you write about what you’d rather be doing? Where would you rather be?”
            He looked surprised, then hopped off to his desk.
            When I went back to check on him, he had written:
 
I wrader bean helping My dad with trash then bean here doing these poem and watering my lemon tree so he dosint die and he lives
           
            “I really like this,” I said. "I have a lemon tree, too, and I know what you mean."
            I leaned over his desk, pencil in hand. “I’m going to show you a trick to make it look like a poem. Read it out loud and every time you pause I’m going to put a line.” I drew a slash at the top of his page. “Then you’re going to rewrite it and every time you see one of these, drop down to the next line.”
            He read the poem aloud and I inserted the slashes, with which he then turned his poem into:
 
I wrader bean helping My dad with trash
then bean here doing these poem
and watering my lemon tree
so he dosint die
and he lives
           
          The boy pointed to a picture of a miniscule lemon tree beneath his poem.
          “Oh, you did a drawing, too, that’s great. Can I take a picture? I want to show my friends to cheer them up because everyone’s feeling bad right now.”
           He nodded soberly. “Okay.”
           “Will you read it to the class?”
           He shook his head, eyes downcast.
           “Can I read it? I think they’re really going to like it.”
         He stayed still for a moment, considering my request. Then he looked up and said in a neutral tone, “I’ll read it.”
           When it was time for the students to share, he came up to the front of the class and read out the poem he’d shown me, with a couple of revisions.
           “I changed my poem,” he said, looking pleased as he passed me on the way back to his seat.
           I nodded. “Yes, I heard that.”
           “I took out poetry and put playing games,” he said more assertively to make sure I understood.
           “Yes, I heard.”
         “Because I like poetry.” He made a gesture for me to follow him to his desk. “Come and take a picture.”
          “I already took one.”
          “But I want you to take this one.” He indicated the revised version.
          As I snapped the shot, I noticed that in addition to changing the words of the poem, he had drawn a second tree, larger than the first, and resplendent with lemons. Next to it stood a boy, pointing at it. Above the tree, next to the last word of his poem, “lives”, was a big smile.
          At the end of the session, he held me back. “I want you to make a poetry book.”
        “I might come back and work with you more and you can have your own poetry book with your poems in it,” I said. “I’m going to talk to your teacher about that.”
          “No, your poetry book,” he said insistently.
          “Okay,” I said. “I’d love to share it with you.”
          He nodded and took out a textbook from inside his desk, preparing for his next class.

I have a cup of tea
And my morning cry
Hurricanes, floods, fires, earthquakes
Gold toilet impunity and missiles exploding
Whales splayed on beaches, 2600 shot dead already this year
We only have 18 years of carbon left my sister tells me
That means temperatures five or six degrees warmer
A woman leaves home to pick up her daughter from school
Arrives back to find her house gone
Dams break, women wade in breast-high floodwater
Brown skin, white skin, yellow, red and black
Donations coming in and not
Volunteers dig rubble with ungloved hands
I only came back to have a quick something to eat
I haven’t slept in three days
Distraught to get to the classroom only to uncover
All the children and their teacher dead
Teenagers scour village squares, pleading for donations
Sending supplies to where no help is given
One passerby cries My cousin is one of the missing
Helicopter scans island damage
No communication no water no electricity
It’ll take half a year to get it all back
No te preocupas, everyone has a generator messages a friend
But he left years ago
You don’t say There is no electricity to pump the gasoline
To another friend whose daughter is packing food, clothing, water, tents, you text
If he sold one of those gold toilets, that money would go a long way
She writes back If he sold all of them, that would pay for the wall
We laugh, and go back to crying

If I wore hats, I would take them all off to Kenneth Koch for his inspiring writing prompts for teaching children poetry that allow them to express their hidden anxieties and desires. And when the normal school constraints on behavior are lifted, poetry can help children find themselves.
            I’ve recently been teaching fourth and fifth grade classes at an elementary school in an area of San Francisco that has the most confusing topography, with circular streets that don’t make any sense. When I manage to find the school, hot and bothered most weeks because, between trying to rely on GPS that doesn’t know where I am and my lack of any sense or direction, I arrive just in the nick of time. But I’m going to keep finding my way there as long as I can, even to the classrooms that are pretty much out of control. There, the children are full of beans, unruly half the time as they flirt outrageously with each other, and sometimes make me laugh so much with their antics that they manage to completely derail whatever lesson I’ve planned for them.
            One of the groups I’ve been working with is the polar opposite. They volunteer in their lunch break to be in a poetry club set up by the school librarian, a woman who radiates warmth and a profound love of books that sets the perfect environment for teaching poetry. The poetry club is made up of seven girls who, the librarian told me, take advantage of the poetry club she set up to give them a chance to escape the noise and behavior of the playground.
            In one session, as I often do with all elementary school children, I had the children read a poem from the “I Wish” section of Koch’s “Wishes, Lies and Dreams”. I then instructed them to write their own poems on what they wished for. We only have twenty to twenty-five minutes together as the children need to have enough time to eat their lunches and no food is allowed in the library. This means no time for the usual discussion period that I include in longer class periods.
            One round-faced fourth-grader, no more than ten years old, whom I’ll call Stella, wandered around the library after the others had started writing their poems, looking at the display copies of books scattered here and there on the top of the low bookcases. She had an absorbed expression on her face as she lifted one, rearranged it on the shelf, and then put it back in its original display, completely focused on her task.
            When I was ten and in a public library on a lonely, solitary afternoon, I knelt on the floor and, thinking I was performing a useful public service, pushed books into the back edge of shelves to make them look neater. The librarian caught me and whisper-yelled at me, what did I think I was doing, and as I flushed in humiliation, pushed me aside to pull them all out again. I stood back and didn’t say anything to Stella, and finally she sat down and began to write.
            It was time for the students to read out their poems and I asked for volunteers. Stella was first to put up her hand. She began with wanting to be legendary and followed that with I wish I wasn’t me.  She then wrote that she wished to be smart and not so loving. Her next line was I wish I was loved. She ended her poem:
 
I wish I don’t have to hide back the insecurity that I own.
I wish I weren’t in the shadows that hide back my truth
I wish people would know me and love me for who I am.
I wish I didn’t hide myself every day.
I wish I didn’t say things that aren’t too nice.
But hiding my self doesn’t help.

Last year I did some substitute teaching in the public school district to add to my retirement credits after I quit teaching in a charter school in the county jail. One day I was on assignment in a kindergarten class. It was at an elementary school at the very end of a block in an area of San Francisco where many of my jail students live when they’re out, barring parole conditions, and where they were raised. Some of them were likely to have gone to the same school and probably had children there now.
           The kindergarten teacher was having a great deal of difficulty controlling her students, so I was assigned to assist her. In the morning, I worked with one group after another at their tables as they struggled through their basic reading assignments while she attempted to counsel a group of three or four children who couldn’t sit still long enough to do any work.
           After recess, a little boy, no more than six years old, came hopping back into the classroom on one leg.
            “My leg is broken! My leg is broken!” he cried.
            “Let me look at it,” I said, concerned.
            He pointed to the middle of his shin, tears running down his face.
            “Wait here,” I said. “I’ll go get the nurse.”
           The teacher was too preoccupied to notice as she tried to corral the other children to sit quietly on the rug facing the white board. On the left side of the board she had pasted a large poster on which was a ladder with the colors yellow, orange, and red to denote gradations of bad behavior.  In between loudly calling the names of children who weren’t listening, the teacher, clearly out of her league, scribbled the names of the offenders on the lower rungs.
           In the office, I told the secretary about the boy and asked to see the nurse. She barely looked up, flapping her hand dismissively. “He walked into the office after recess so it’s obviously not broken.”
           I went back into the classroom and sat with the boy, who was still crying. “Show me where your leg is broken.”
            He rolled up the right leg of his jeans and pointed to his shin.
          An idea popped into my head. “Listen,” I said, “I’m going to get some magic ointment. That should make it feel better.”
             He looked at me doubtfully, wide-eyed through his tears. I rummaged through a stack of papers and books near the sink next to the back window, searching for anything that would do. A bottle of hand sanitizer emerged. I tore off a piece of brown paper towel and pumped a little onto it.
             “Here,” I said, handing it to him. “Let’s rub this on.”
            He looked at it quizzically, his sobs suddenly still.
             “That’s hand sanitizer,” he blurted distrustfully.
             “Yes, but there’s magic in it,” I said authoritatively. “Come on, let’s rub it on your leg.”
            He reluctantly took the paper towel from me and, with long strokes, rubbed the ointment into his skin. Then he looked up and said, “It’s still broken.”
             I thought fast. “Put your hands over your heart and fill them with love.”
             “What?” as if to say, “You’re crazy, lady.”
           I repeated, “Put your hands over your heart and fill them with love.” I placed his hands, palms downwards, on his chest. “Now breathe in all the love you’ve got in there.”
            He looked at me questioningly, but obediently closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
             “Now place your hands on your leg and give it love,” I instructed. “That will heal it.”
            With great seriousness, he placed his palms on his leg with his eyes closed and breathed in and out a few times.
            “Is it feeling better?”
           He nodded.
            “Okay, now off you go back to your desk.”
         The boy hopped on one leg toward his desk and banged into the edge of a console piled with books.
            “Ow!” he cried, grabbing his arm. “My arm is broken!”
        Trying not to laugh, I went for some more hand sanitizer. We followed the same procedure as before, but now on his arm. This time I didn’t have to tell him to heal himself with love; he placed his hands on his heart and his arm automatically, with a dedicated expression on his face.
         At the end of the day, after all the children had left the classroom, the boy came back in while I was chatting with the paraprofessional. She was an elderly woman with years of experience at the school and had joined the class for the afternoon to individually tutor children on their literacy and math skills.
          “Call your grandfather,” she reminded him.
         The boy rummaged in his pale blue backpack stained with dirt and pulled out a cell phone.
         “Grandpa, come and get me,” he called loudly into the phone and then, the little man that he was, went outside to wait with the teacher who was on yard duty.
          “Does his grandfather normally pick him up?” I asked.
         The paraprofessional turned to continue putting away her folders.
         “His mother was arrested last night,” she said matter-of-factly. “The police turned up at their house last night and took her away.”

​How to deal with aggression-or not.
        On my way from San Francisco to Santa Rosa, on a congested two-lane segment of the highway, a man in a gold Audi suddenly whipped around me to just a few feet between me and the car in front and gave me the finger. Then he continued to zoom in and out of traffic like a maniac.
            I’d been on the highway a couple of days earlier, driving in the opposite direction, with a car sitting dangerously on my tail in an equally congested two-lane line of traffic. Looking in the rear view mirror, I flapped my hand to indicate that he should back off. He leaned forward and shook his head from side to side in an exaggerated manner and continued to hug my bumper. I waved my phone, pretending I was taking a picture, pretty pathetic, and which made no difference until he finally disappeared onto a ramp off the highway. A few miles later, a jeep appeared in my rear view mirror looking like it wanted to drive right through me.
             “Back off!” I blurted, again flapping my hand.
            The driver threw up her arms and waved them around like I was crazy, laughing uproariously with her friends sitting up front with her.
            Now as I continued north, fuming at being given the finger and almost driven into, I stopped off in Petaluma, a town about halfway to Santa Rosa, to meet my partner for lunch. Unusually for a Friday afternoon, several seats sat vacant at a long family-style table at the café. A cheerful wavy-haired waitress showed me to a seat. After setting a place for me, she set one for my partner across the table with a second set of silverware, glass of water and menu. As I waited for my partner to appear, I read an article on my phone.
            Suddenly an old woman (older than us as my sister and I like to joke), accompanied by a middle-aged woman looking like her daughter, took my partner’s seat and started perusing the menu placed there for my partner while her daughter headed for the restroom.
           I leaned forward and said politely, “I’m sorry, someone’s sitting there.” I grew up in Britain so many of my sentences often start with I’m sorry. My therapist only allows me to say it once per session.
           The woman didn’t look up from the menu. I said it again, same result. I amplified my voice and repeated myself. A diner on her left, kitty-corner to me and noticeably missing the help gene, silently observed me trying to get the woman’s attention.
            I leaned forward across the table and said it again, louder. Finally, the woman looked up.
            “I’m sorry," I said for the fifth time, “someone is sitting there.”
            “Someone’s sitting here?” she repeated with a blank expression.
            “Yes,” I said.
            She looked around and then back at me, quizzically. She didn’t move.
            I pointed to the glass of water. “Look, you can see even the water is here. Someone’s sitting there.”
            “I already heard you,” she said flatly. She slowly shifted to the empty seat on her right. Her daughter, who’d returned and was standing at the corner of the table, glared at me and twisted around to look at my partner’s empty seat.
         Finally, my partner arrived with her normal ebullience, cell phone in one hand, overstuffed handbag slung over her shoulder. After going to the restroom, she arrived back at the table. I showed her the seat saved for her.
            “I don’t want to sit there,” she said and sat herself down next to me.
           Both the old woman and her daughter pointedly glared at the now empty seat and for the rest of the meal they kept twisting around to stare irately at it.
            When we were done eating, my partner accompanied me in my car, leaving hers in parking space outside, and we drove around the corner in a line of traffic to the main shopping street. Without warning, the car in front started backing up. The last time someone in front of me backed up without seeing me, I had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. It was in San Francisco back in the late 1990s; the car had slammed into me and destroyed the hood and front bumper. In a daze, I’d got out and said to the driver, who’d also got out of his car, “I just got diagnosed with breast cancer, I can’t take this.” And the man replied, “I’ve got AIDS and I can’t either.” We both laughed in dismayed disbelief.  In those days, a truly San Francisco moment.
         But here I was in a small town post-Trump and nobody was laughing. I honked my horn to alert the driver of my presence. He and a woman obviously his wife turned into animated angry puppets, the wife’s face spinning around to give me the evil eye.
            “That’s it,” I said, now completely fed up with all the bad behavior. “I’m going to say something.”
            “I’m getting out of the car,” my partner said, never one to invite confrontation, and did just that. “Call me when you’re done.”
            I pulled over to the side of the road. After the couple had parked and were getting out of their car and could hear me, I called over with forced calm, “I was honking so you’d know I was behind you.”
            The couple nodded and waved their hands at me in a friendly way, but had obviously not been brought up in Britain.
          I continued on my journey north along Kentucky Street, jumping in alarm as a truck zoomed crookedly past me. A woman screamed out of the window, “You fucking asshole” and other words to that effect all the way to the traffic light until she disappeared around the corner.
            So how to deal with aggression? I pulled over and parked, then burst into tears.