1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below the poem

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

When I Taught Her How To Tie Her Shoes

A revelation, the student
in high school who didn’t know
how to tie her shoes.

I took her into the book-room, knowing
what I needed to teach was perhaps more
important than Shakespeare or grammar,

guided her hands through the looping,
the pulling of the ends. After several
tries, she got it, walked out the door

empowered. How many lessons are like
that – skills never mastered in childhood,
simple tasks, ignored, let go for years?

This morning, my head bald from chemotherapy,
my feet farther away than they used to be
as I bend to my own shoes, that student

returns to teach me the meaning of life:
to simply tie the laces and walk out
of myself into this sunny winter day.

Penny Harter
https://www.pennyharterpoet.com

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Next Read Around is September 9, 2022 at 4:00 PM (PST)

My Thoughts

Penny Harter’s poem about teaching a high school girl how to tie her shoe, a skill she did not learn earlier, triggered two sets of memories for me. I remembered the first time I tied my shoe. I swelled with pride when my father praised me. That tiny mastery is a reference experience for “I can do it.” I had other accomplishments after that, some small and some big, but the pride of that moment stands out so much that I often refer to it as my definition of success. In such moments, we stand taller as if some gravity has left our bones, as if the fog of doubt lifts and we can forge on with a new confidence.

That was before the edifice of my self was contaminated with his disappointment, before I developed a nagging sense that I had somehow missed a critical lesson in school or life, before my inadequacies became glaringly obvious. Later, studying psychology, I learned the weight of such feelings are common and commonly shrink us. The set of memories that I access in a given moment has a huge impact on my experience and results. We learn, in the poem, that Harter is bald from a chemotherapy treatment when she recalls teaching the girl to tie her shoe. This reminds her, and us, that it’s never too late to learn basic lessons and that tiny masteries in the face of grave difficulties and devastating news may be the only thing that can get us to walk out of ourselves and go on.

Prompt Menu

  1. Journal or write a poem about the first time you tied your shoe or some other early accomplishement. How can that moment serve as a reference experience for you in your life now?

  2. Journal or write a poem about the experience of thinking or feeling that you missed a critical lesson in life or failed to learn a basic skill or about something you felt ashamed to admit that you really did not know or know how how to do.

  3. Consider a time when you taught a child how to do some simple skill like tying a shoe and describe it in detail. How might that have impacted the child or impacted you?

  4. Write a manual for tying a shoe. It is acutally much harder to describe it than to do it or to show soemhow how to do it. Start from the necessary material (a shoe that fits you with shoelaces already laced, etc) and then go from there.

  5. Consider some trauma or difficulty in your life and find a moment (or re-imagine it with a moment) in which you find something powerfully meaningful to you that allows you to go on.

  6. Journal or write a poem about “walking out of yourself.'“ What does that mean to you? In what ways could that be a positive step? In what ways could it be a negative step?

  7. As usual, write about whatever else inspires you from the poem or from life.