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| "Knock It Off" T-shirt Available from Providence's Frog & Toad Store https://www.frogandtoadstore.com/knock-it-off-t-shirt.html |
Day 12 NaPoWriMo in Which I Do the Poetry Assignment My Friend's Middle School Daughter Was Assigned and Dedicate It to My Governor
My friend's daughter was assigned to write two poems, one about how Covid-19 is limiting their activity, another about how it is liberating their activity. Each poem had to be 18 lines or longer. (Eighteen was such an arbitrary number! Where did this middle school teacher come up with this length? IDK)
I gave some "tips" because my friend's daughter was stumped, and then I decided to do the assignment myself. Below is the first part of the assignment, a poem about Covid-19 limiting my activity. I'll post the other one in an upcoming post.
"Knock It Off" ~Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo
Getting fed up with people who continue to violate stay-at-home orders, Governor Gina Raimondo, at one of her daily press briefings, told the scofflaws, "Knock it off." The Providence store, "Frog & Toad" loved the "Italian mom, telling it like it is" aspect of this so much, they turned it into a t-shirt (as seen above). I used key words from one of Governor Raimondo's press briefings to write my 18-line poem about how the coronavirus is limiting my activity, and then titled it after the governor's now-famous saying.Knock It Off
poem for "Gina"
I liked when we could all congregate
The days on the other side of this
Where no meanness or panic
Overwhelmed the business of the day
Our system can’t handle the surge
So all the plans have been canceled
Indefinitely
How we are hurting is individual
The empathetic and the sympathetic
All the vulnerable groups
I have new sights on my horizon
No beaches and parks are open
Instead the increments of my yard
Must tide me over
We have to buckle down in the
Square footage of out internal worlds
And promise to mitigate the numbers
Readying the hearth and securing the community