The GOING OVER poem for Sister Kim and the girls of Little Flower Catholic High School

In just a few hours, I will at long last meet the girls of Little Flower Catholic High School. These girls who are led by the endearing, catalytic, life-changing Sister Kim.  These girls who read Undercover and House of Dance with such love in their hearts. These girls with whom I will sit and write a little memoir, sit and talk a little Berlin, sit and then maybe stand and dance.

This summer, the girls will be reading Going Over and writing a poem somehow evoked or provoked by this story about love on either side of the Berlin Wall 1983.

This morning, I give this poem to them:
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I Wanted  

I wanted you near I wanted 

you now I wanted you

loving like I live

loving, which is to say:

the quince that crawls along the stone,

the glass that shatters sun,

the rupture calm of the hymn I found

just yesterday,

waiting on you.

We play our music like freedom here.

We leave our hearts close to our skin.

We say that we are to whatever color we choose

which is to say: neon lavender lime

the silver of smoke

the yellow of the star in the eye of the scope,

the pink of my hair.

Choose.

Live what love is.

Love the color you are.

Good morning, Sister Kim, Kate Walton, my fellow authors, and all the Little Flowers. This poem is for you. And here, thanks to kind Serena Agusto-Cox, is another poem, written on another day, about the lit-up glass of others' stories.

The world, my girls, is your oyster.