Last semester, 4th graders at Borton Magnet School participated in a residency that sought to unite scientific curiosity and exploration of the natural world with poetry. They crafted poems inspired by pollinators, microscopic creatures, symbioses, and the water cycle.
I hoped to deflate the notion that we are either scientists or artists, that we go to school to study one or the other, or that people who engage in either of these activities think differently. If using one is like having a flashlight to find your way through the night, then using two is double light. With two, we see more.
In one lesson, scientist Joe Spraker shared quirky examples of symbioses, including a louse that replaces a fish’s tongue, a bird that leads a badger to hives so the badger can break it open for both of them, and microscopic fungi and bacteria that communicate with one another.
Each child was then asked to imagine being in a symbiotic partnership. Which creature would you be and how would you interact with your symbiotic partner? They wrote odes celebrating these symbiotic relationships. In one poem a bird writes, “Oh Hippo, your ticks are like chocolate chips.”
In another lesson, students wrote poems inspired by Camille Dungy’s “Observations on the Return of Migratory Birds.” We contemplated what it means to observe and wrote poems inspired by photographs. Excited by a picture of a microscopic tardigrade, or water bear, one student wrote, “It is squishy like a raspberry. It is hiding like a penny. It could live inside a clock.”
In yet another lesson, students talked to pollinators. If you could ask any question in the world, what would it be? These poems, inspired by James Wright’s “To the Saguaro Cactus Tree in the Desert Rain”, resulted in letters celebrating Sonoran desert pollinators like long-nosed bats and moths.
One student wrote the following:
To the Moth of Light
I had no idea your wings are transparent mirrors
against moonlight dear wings of the night.
How do you take flight?
My secret is that I am the whisperer of the wind.
You are the Stardust Angel of Night!
You are like a cloaked dust spirit of the moon.
I had no idea you were a pollinator.
Perhaps art is a science in which we call forth our powers of observations, our keen attention to detail, and use of the five senses, honing the ability to ask questions and contemplate deeply. Through art, as in any other science, we strive to satiate our intense curiosity for the world, its peoples and places and creatures. And in this striving there is also celebration and love for our beautiful, bizarre, blue planet.
I leave you with a pantoum written collaboratively on our last day of the residency:
Water Cycle
Water is unusual
Water is a clear liquid
Water on a journey to Africa
Evaporation: flying in the air like a ghost
Water is a clear liquid
The world is cruel
Evaporating: flying in the air like a ghost
Wishing for spicy food and a way down
The world is cruel
Water on a journey to Africa
Wishing for spicy food and a way down
Water is unusual
Image Credit: Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Saraiya Kanning is an intern at the Poetry Center as well as a graduate student in fiction at the UA Creative Writing MFA program. For the past year she has been teaching creative writing in Tucson public schools for the Writing the Community program.