All Nonfiction
- Bullying
- Books
- Academic
- Author Interviews
- Celebrity interviews
- College Articles
- College Essays
- Educator of the Year
- Heroes
- Interviews
- Memoir
- Personal Experience
- Sports
- Travel & Culture
All Opinions
- Bullying
- Current Events / Politics
- Discrimination
- Drugs / Alcohol / Smoking
- Entertainment / Celebrities
- Environment
- Love / Relationships
- Movies / Music / TV
- Pop Culture / Trends
- School / College
- Social Issues / Civics
- Spirituality / Religion
- Sports / Hobbies
All Hot Topics
- Bullying
- Community Service
- Environment
- Health
- Letters to the Editor
- Pride & Prejudice
- What Matters
- Back
Summer Guide
- Program Links
- Program Reviews
- Back
College Guide
- College Links
- College Reviews
- College Essays
- College Articles
- Back
An Exploration of Assimilation Education
Screw That: An Exploration of Assimilation Education
God lives
in a shoebox.
Assignment:
Times New Roman, 12pt, double-spaced.
Analyze, summarize, aggrandize, synthesize.
Pack, unpack, react, redact.
Assertion: god lives
[God LIVES! A proclamation? Stand-alone line, statement of fact, capitalization out of respect or rather born of grammatical and political correction? ]
Modifier: in a shoebox
[with other bits of memory, like a scrapbook of childhood. Emphasized prepositional phrase implies boundaries, capabilities, status quo. Moving on from naïveté, an abandonment of prior principles? Discard, full of silicon beads and tissue paper and the smell of August 18th shoved under the bed to collect dust and mold.]
Subject; god, shoebox
Predicate: live(s)
Is it a sarcastic afterthought enforced by the enjambment of the verse?
Or rather could it be an admission of compartmentalized consumerist Christianity?
The claim that god lives,
- a hopeful evangelical moment-
then belittled by the resignation that God(!) has limits.
Fourteen hundred words strip .36% of their number down to the atomic level. See the protons of the poem? Feel the veins and framework! Admire the pixels and the problems! The author, an ancient oracle, and everything is related to the Mayan calendar if you read between the lines. Socrates himself crouches behind the fourth word like he’s playing hide-and-seek. Read it again!
And again!
And again?
<And then>
The truth.
two separate lines, selected at random from two separate poems by two different people. Slapped together, they provide an avenue for abstract thought.
Well, this changes things.
What do
you I we me he her they
even know
anyway?
Similar Articles
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
This article has 0 comments.
identified at the beginning as an in-class assignment. Over the course of five days, the class worked the poem to its bare bones, only to find out that it didn't mean anything at all. To quote the teacher;
"You. Don't. Know. Anything."
and rocked my little writer's world.