“I am poetry,
surrounding the dreamer,
Ever present,
I capture the spirit,
enslave
the reluctant pen,
and become
the breath
on the writer’s only road.”
Pam Munoz Ryan’s The Dreamer was a gift to read. A chance to learn about a poet, a different culture, a different way of seeing and being in the world.
And, it was a gift to talk about it together: Walters Woods. A beautiful summer evening. Chilean desserts. A hike in the woods. Poetry found and shared.
We started book club by going on a scavenger hunt – collecting the kind of treasures that Neftali would have loved. Despite not being in a Chilean rainforest, we found all sorts of cool things…feathers, interesting rocks, beautiful leaves, even a poem!
We wrote words in the dirt, talked about Chilean culture, tried to answer to some of Neruda’s big questions (our favorite:“Does a metamorphosis begin from the outside in? Or from the inside out?”) and come up with our own, and, we played in the forest…even the moms did.
“Pablo Neruda’s poems tramped through the mud [with the fieldworker]…knocked at the doors of mansions…sat at the table of the baker…The shopkeeper leaned over his counter and read them to his customers…The poems became books that people passed from hand to hand. The books traveled over fences. and bridges. and across borders. soaring from continent to continent. until he had passed thousands of gifts through a hole in the fence to a multitude of people in every corner of the world.”
May we continue to listen to the poems that others gift to us. May we share our gifts with others through our own holes in the fence.
Book Club for Boys 