If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Next Read-Around is 3/13/25 at 5:00 PM PST

How It Works:

  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

  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

My Thoughts

I love poems that capture the uncommon in our everyday life: relatable occasional experiences that are part of most people’s lives, like Chera Hammons does in her poem, Classroom Hatch. We each have likely had the experience of hosting newly hatched chicks or a litter of pups or kittens: primal experiences of tending for tiny, vulnerable beings newly arrived in the world. There are many relatable moments in Hammons’ poem: the grief of senseless loss; taking on a task because we cant trust others to do it; the small heroism in trying to save something from the cruelty of the world; the recognition that even a helping hand can be frightful to the motherless chicks tossed into a world without a teacher and protector.

I recall our cat dragging her litter, one by one, under the my bedcovers when I was was in second grade. No one in my family could explain why she chose to do so. Mom wanted them out; and made me put them back in a box. But she turned around and brought them all back a little while later. I was touched and felt special that she chose my bed and I fought for them to stay. Hammons shares her own memories of nascent caretaking and then deftly puts this tenderness in contrast with a memory of salting snails to prevent intrusion on a wealthy family’s green hedges. Salting snails is likely to be another occasional familiarity most of us have experienced. The contrast sets us on that razor edge of life and death in “a day we can’t live beyond.” Too often, we let the bad memories stick with us for a lifetime rather than the precious ones, the ones that teach us lessons about kindness in a cruel world.

Classroom Hatch

My husband tells me every chick his fifth graders
took home last year died cruelly:

crushed by younger siblings
or drowned after falling into

a basin of water. One timid girl’s dog
swallowed her chick whole

the moment she set it down,
believing it to be an offering.

This year we have already
had enough of senseless loss.

So he brings the chicks home,
and in our fragrant kitchen

we can hear them chirp, chirp, chirp
from their plastic bin in the garage. Asking for what?

They flee to the corners when we feed them,
trembling and trilling loudly in alarm.

When I was little, I had a duckling
that slept in my lap while I read,

and later I had a white rabbit kit
I carried with me in a sock

when my mother went into the houses
of the wealthy to do their ironing.

They used to ask her to salt the snails
that lived behind their cool green hedges, too,

and she would. We are all set into a day
that we can’t live beyond, and I know this.

I try to feed the chicks mealworms from my hands,
crouching there sometimes for hours.

I can’t remember how
to make them believe in kindness.

—Chera Hammons
https://www.cherahammons.com/
https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/590-classroom-hatch

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about some accidental cruelty (or intentional—like salting snails) you experienced or perpetrated.

  2. Journal or write a poem about caring for a baby animal. Or write about some lesson you learned when young about kindness and caring.

  3. Describe a situation where others failed to do something and you took it upon yourself to do it.

  4. Use Hammons phrase about having had enough of senselss Losses as your prompt. You might also consider the difference a “sensless loss” and a one that “makes sense.”

  5. Journal or write about your (or a character’s) relationship with a pet or animal when young.

  6. Compose a piece with a contrast between caring and cuelty.

  7. Use Hammons line: We are all set into a day we can’t live beyond…. as your prompt and write whatever comes to mind from there.

  8. Journal or write a poem about what it might take to make someone, or some (frightened/abused) animal, believe in kindness.

  9. As usual, write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.