How Poetry Opens Doors: Dreams, Caged Birds, and the Students We Serve

Poetry has a way of saying what a lesson plan never could. When I teach the SIM Possible Selves Learning Strategy (KU-CRL: SIM) with my students, I love springboarding into poetry, especially the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance and the poets who carry its legacy forward today. Preparing for this first post in that vein, I want to share some of my own wonder as I trace one thread through this poetry of hope: the recurring image of a caged bird, and a door.

A note on the poems below: as educators, we take plagiarism seriously, so rather than quoting Hughes, Dunbar, and Angelou directly, I've paraphrased their language and imagery fairly heavily throughout this post to convey the spirit of their work in my own words. I'd encourage you to read each poem in full at the Poetry Foundation link at the end.

The Dream Keeper

Possible Selves asks students to imagine who they might become and to name the dreams they're carrying, often before they've had much practice believing those dreams are allowed. It's no accident that the strategy turns to Langston Hughes for language to do this work. In his poem "The Dream Keeper," Hughes invites the dreamers among us to hand over their dreams and the melodies of their hearts, so that something as fragile as a dream might be gathered up and kept safe from a world that can be too rough with it.

That's precisely the invitation we extend to our students. Bring us your dreams. We'll help you hold them.

Hughes returns to this theme in his poem "Dreams," where he warns, in essence, that a life without dreams becomes something broken and something frozen; a bird that can no longer fly, a field with nothing growing in it. It's a small poem, but it carries the weight of everything we believe about why this work matters. We become, in partnership with each student, the holders of sacred dreams as they explore who they might be and what's possible for them.

A Door, a Cage, a Song

Langston Hughes wasn't the first poet to reach for the image of a bird with a broken wing, and Maya Angelou would not be the last to write about a caged bird, first in her extraordinary 1969 memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and again in her 1985 poem "Caged Bird."

My oldest poetry book falls open, almost on its own, to Paul Laurence Dunbar's 1899 poem "Sympathy." Dunbar writes as the caged bird itself, describing what it feels like to beat its wings against cruel bars until they bleed, not from joy, but from something closer to a prayer sent up from the deepest part of its heart; a plea flung toward heaven. It is, he tells us, why the caged bird sings at all.

That poem calls from a place where only love can hear it and help heal it. We all have something, don't we? Yes. We do.

If you'd like to read these poems in full, the Poetry Foundation has them freely available at poetryfoundation.org, along with a wealth of other work by Hughes, Dunbar, Angelou, and the poets who followed them.

Why This Is the Heart of Love 2 Read

This poetry is the heart of our mission at Love 2 Read, Inc.

Our students come to us carrying their dreams and their fragile hopes, and for some, their disappointments and their discouragement too. Their families come to us because they cannot afford the most expensive tutoring services out there; they simply want help for the person they love who is struggling with reading or spelling. Of course they do. So do we.

We could charge those same high fees. We have the credentials, the expertise, the experience to justify it. But how could we, when the need is this great for each child, each family, each community we serve?

We are called to serve. And in serving, we get to witness something that still feels almost miraculous every time: the sparkle in a student's eyes the moment they "get it," the moment they think to themselves, Yes. I did it. I can do it. I can learn to read.

We tutors at Love 2 Read are a selfish group, in the best sense of the word. We keep coming back because we love watching that cage door swing open, and we love watching that bird fly free, every single time we tutor a student.

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Sources and further reading: The poems referenced here, Langston Hughes' "The Dream Keeper" and "Dreams," Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Sympathy," and Maya Angelou's "Caged Bird," are available in full at the Poetry Foundation, poetryfoundation.org