Boston Green Academy Workshop – Father Comes Home From The Wars
FEB 26, 2015
We had the incredible opportunity to spend the morning with a group of amazing students from Boston Green Academy in Brighton (and their equally amazing teachers) breaking down and digging deeper into their experience with Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3). They, along with the students from CRLS who had a similar workshop experience a few weeks back, saw the production yesterday at our second student matinee.
The students worked with my co-facilitator Nicole and I to unpack some of their feelings about the show, what themes and big ideas they could tease out of Suzan-Lori Parks’s play, and how we can respond creatively to those themes through poetry. That’s right. We wrote poems wicked early in the morning.
I.
STOP! Look what you are doing!
Cutting dreams, hopes! Why, why us?
Why do we allow them to own us?
Why do we allow them to put a price on us?
Who are we? What are our meanings?
What do we live up to?
How do you feel being “less” than someone?
Our ancestors before us have
faced mistreatment for hundreds of years
We can do it! We can do it!
II.
All we want in life
Is only one thing
A simple concept
A five-letter word
In our eyes, value is everything
But you underhanded me.
Though we were equal, we were meant to be
It’s easy to see we only focus on money
Or a dream
We want all of this–
Greed.
III.
But responsibility leads to the fear of ownership
Being owned by another leads to comfort for some
Perhaps my owner still fears?
Should I be scared?
Who and what should I fear;
Can I fear myself, if I don’t know myself?
Everyone is born into some sort of chain,
It’s just about finding that one quality to break it
Something you have to overcome
and do things you’ve never done
Fear– is what you don’t know
IV.
You have to steal yourself from society,
Loyalty to yourself
Define who you are, loyalty to your
Self
Would you give your
friend away?
What does friendship mean
to you?
Honesty, loyalty, love
Loyalty begins with you
V.
Stand up for something or you’ll die for nothing,
But who cares, ‘cause who were you anyway?
I know who I am, but I know who I want to be
I want to be just like the wind, free.
But they pull me down with doubts,
As they seek all my faults.
I begin to unravel into a pool of lost hope and failure
As my story begins to come to an end
I’ll take all those fails and hopes and reconstruct myself
VI.
There is no value to a person.
It’s not about what you know
It’s how hard you work
Others do not determine your price,
Because a person’s life is priceless.
Everybody has their own worth.
You cannot compare yourself to somebody else.
Your decisions are all based on what you value,
what you want out of life is instrumental
to the choices that you make
Now here is YOUR assignment (you weren’t getting out of this without homework to do): read the BGA students’ profound group poem below and compare/contrast it with the poem from the CRLS students that we posted previously. The CRLS students wrote their poem in response to an excerpt from the play, with only minimal context. The BGA students wrote theirs directly after seeing the production. It’s interesting to see the difference in inspiration and personal connections between the two.AT LEAST I THINK IT’S INTERESTING.
Shout out to Corina Rangel, Lucas Hall, Matt Holzer, Joan Matsalia and Ivana Freitas for setting this up and inviting us into BGA. Also, thanks to our guests Eva Rosenberg and The Harvard Gazette!
