I am the first to drink of the blue that still looks for its eye.
I drink from your footprint and see:
you roll through my fingers, pearl, and you grow!
You grow, as do all the forgotten.
You roll: the black hailstone of sadness
is caught by a kerchief turned white with waving goodbye.Paul Celan (1952)
—translated from the German by Michael Hamburger
MOHN UND GEDACHTNIS (Poppy and Memories, 1952)
I stood arms outstretched, face to the heavens, on the newly mown grass of the chook run at the dementia center today. I let the hail stones pelt my face and ping off my body. I was in intimate conversation with super cooled water droplets. I laughed out loud.
I wanted grandpa to strip down to his white (really institutionally swashed grey) Y-fronts and join me, but he retained the reticence of an early 20th Century learner, suggesting instead that if I didn’t come back inside he would see the charge nurse and have me put on the “unsuitable visitor list”.
But being open to whatever the heavens could throw down was a good thing. He should have joined me. When I felt the hail on my skin and saw it pronging around the cowering chooks I knew, I just knew somehow that I haven’t fallen to the ground for the last time. I haven’t done waiting, and I haven’t done hoping.
Hailstones tell stories through their structure. When you bisect a hailstone the concentric rings tell you the number of times the hailstone has held high hopes – the concentric rings tell you how many journeys reached to the top of the storm before the inevitable surrender to forces of gravity and the drop to the chickens below.
When you bisect me you will find many concentric rings. But I refuse to acknowledge Celan’s “waving goodbye” kerchief wrt Grandpa or anyone else. I am determined to only ever grow more rings.
The gossip in the schools out west is that dropping to the chickens below is happening to more than hailstones – I’ve blogged before about the disappointing “ground hog day funding of the MOE gifted and talented Talent Development Initiative 2006-2008 in Yes we are ALL different. -
I see from the spin doctors working on the TKI website that the MoE prefer to frame “ground hog day contracts” as “TDI enhance” and “TDI ignite” – you have just got to admire the cleverness in this.
It seems that one of the big winners in the TDI Ignite
Meeting the needs of gifted students: Kelston Intervention Team
Seventeen cluster schools, ranging from decile 3 to decile 10, with students from more than 50 different cultural communities, will be involved in professional development, incorporating Resource Teachers: Learning and Behaviour in a mentoring programme designed to address the needs of gifted students with social, emotional and/or behavioural difficulties.
may have failed to meet expectations of "ignite", and after almost a full years funding fallen like a hailstone to the chickens below.
Word in schools out west is that once the whistleblower tootled, key player/s scrambled to distance themselves from the project and people have been called to Wellington to account. If the gossip is true – then rolling the black hailstone of sadness is appropriate – for if a years worth of government money has disappeared into something that fails to meet the expectations of MoE “ignite speak”, then the RTLB’s and the kids from 50 different cultural communities and seventeen different schools out west are still waiting for programmes to meet their specific learning needs.
Dunno, it seems to me that the kerchiefs of gifted kids in New Zealand are too often turned white with waving goodbye
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