The housing crisis was the topic of a free poetry workshop hosted by Firefolk Arts in Waitsfield on Saturday, February 1. Participants reflected on housing issues and notions of home through a series of writing prompts, facilitated by Harwood Union High School sophomore Harmony B. Devoe, Warren.
The workshop was supported by Sundog Poetry and Urban Word’s National Youth Poet Laureate Program, for which Devoe was a winner last year.
One writing prompt was to create a “found poem,” which draws from and reassembles existing texts like newspaper articles and speeches – “the literary equivalent of a collage,” according to the Academy of American Poets.
Participants used an opinion piece published to the website of the ACLU last summer, titled “The U.S. Supreme Court and Vermont’s Homelessness Crisis.” The authors critique the Supreme Court for allowing municipalities to arrest and ticket unhoused people for sleeping outside, even when adequate shelter or housing is unavailable.
State representative Dara Torre, Moretown, created and shared this poem based on the op-ed at Saturday’s workshop:
On any given night
This crisis comes
Sleeping outside
1,000 children and senior citizens stay awake
Or be arrested
An impossible choice
Many others shared pieces of writing at the workshop. Here is one from Devoe:
“Tabula Rasa” By Harmony Devoe:
I stand for the kids.
Whoever is hurting
The most children;
I will not
Be on their side
Their lives
become
Dull
As the rubble
Covers their homes
As we pull
The triggers
Anyone
Hurting children
Is unjust.
If Locke
Was right
If everyone
Is born
A blank slate
A chalkboard
Waiting for a teacher’s scribbles
Then
Every child
Is innocent
Every child
Is innocent.
No child deserves to die
No child is born
With the urge to kill
The aspiration
To assassinate
The only thing
That turns a child to evil
Is society
The society of
adults
Of politicians
Of insensitive people
Who allow
More money to be spent on weapons
To kill children
Than feeding
Or housing
The children.
I stand
With the kids
Because
I am one
And if I ignore
What is happening
To the other kids
If I turn around
Because I think
It doesn’t impact me
I would be just as awful
And repulsive
As the adults
Who allow all this
For business
What if
I was that kid
Under rubble
With bullets
In my chest
A bomb
In my home?
No child
Deserves
To be homeless
To lose their family
To be fed not food, but lies
To die.
