Through the Halls of Power Into Haiku

Last week I was in Washington, D.C. for the spring meeting of the National Writing Project, and it was spring indeed. The city was noisy with the din of traffic and sirens, and the broad streets bustled with throngs of tourists and school groups and locals in suits who strode by with cell phones at their ears, but the air was mild and fragrant with bloom. The branches of the blossomed trees were delicately etched against a luminous silver sky that now and then rained lightly upon us.

In the uncommitted spaces between business, Jan and I paid homage to the monuments and landmarks, feeling patriotic, never cynical, but we’re teachers, after all. We even got passes to see the Senate in session, shedding our purses and electronics at security, briefly becoming unfettered nobodies (how odd it feels to be schlepping nothing) for balcony seats in a theater of power where Senators in living color were debating and voting on budget amendments.

The President was in Europe, but I had imagined I would feel a different kind of energy in the nation’s capital in this era of Obama. Indeed his image was on tee shirts, postcards, books, and posters everywhere, a ubiquitous new icon. I even glimpsed a panhandler on a street corner sporting an Obama shirt, and quite a few giggling tourists (including Jan and me) snapped pictures of each other standing next to a life-size cardboard Presidential facsimile. Why not? It is refreshing when leadership feels congruent with our values and our hopes, evoking pride instead of embarrassment. But there was very little residue of Inaugural ebullience here. In fact, I sensed a gritty sort of tension.

Once in the course of our wanderings I turned back and glimpsed a poster of Lincoln through the glass lobby door of a building I had entered. The juxtaposition of the poster and the marble edifice of the building struck me as arty, somehow, framed by the doorway, and I took a picture, inadvertently pointing my camera in the direction of the security checkpoint. A burly guard accosted me and demanded that I delete the image.

“Do not ever photograph security,” he said angrily. “I am very serious.”

“I know you’re serious, sir,” I replied, showing him the image and deleting it.

“We are very serious here,” he said again, as though to leave me with that lasting thought.

I believe it. These are serious times and the evidence is everywhere.

But the purpose of our Washington gathering was to garner support and strengthen the Writing Project. It is not my intent to write about this here, but we are a network of teachers, teachers who value writing across the curriculum and beyond, who know that writing is the currency by which we manage our lives, and who understand that language and expression are at the core of who we are. Writing is the way to engagement, the way thought becomes words and words become action, a skill and an art we must transfer to our students if they are to become responsible citizens who think and communicate effectively. 

And when you put such teachers together, you do feel a sense of hope, even when the world seems strained and stressed and sometimes downright scary. Times are hard, but that's why we were there.

These words of Lincoln’s are carved in stone in some great hall we passed through: The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just––a way which if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.

I love the alliterative sounds, of course: plain and peaceful, generous and just. But above all, I love what the words imply, for they seem to belong in the answer to almost any question, sound tenets for solutions in the season we are in.

Outside it was snowing pink petals beneath the silver sky and I was summoned by the fragrance of hyacinth to step into a haiku and inhale springtime.