My Poetry

I do not like poetry. Just like how I do not like Jacob Statorius. But here are a few of my poems.

Not Afraid:
Left for dead
You’ll die anyway,
they said
Here I am
I’m not dead
I’m not thriving
Barely surviving
But yet again,
I’m not dead

This is a poem I wrote inspired by the Revenant. It has repetition, line breaks and rhythm. This is my best and favorite poem. I thought of it really quickly and then edited it.

Sam Saslow:

Samsas
Young god, french fry
Always ballin’, unless
YAI YAI YAI YAI LING CHING
J Crew

This is a poem about Sam. It is a haiku. It has syllable count and it is funny. It is a silly poem, which can be good or bad.

五七五持:

今天我学了
我最喜欢的饮料
可乐和橙汁
Today I learned
My favorite drinks are
Coke and orange juice
(Jīn tiān wǒ xué le
wǒ zuì xǐhuan de yin liao
kě lè he cheng zhi)

This is a 5-7-5 poem in Mandarin. It is not a haiku because it is not about nature. It has character== count. It was hard to get the grammar right.

Poetry

For fourth quarter writing, we are learning about poetry. So far we have learned a lot about different types of poems like cinquains and haiku’s, and how to write them. In Mandarin for Poem in Your Pocket day, we wrote a 五七五持. That means 5-7-5 poem. It is not a haiku because it is not about nature. A challenge doing the 五七五持 was that syllables do no mean anything in Chinese. Each character has pinyin, but it is only one syllable each, so instead of 5-7-5 syllables, we did 5-7-5 characters.

My 五七五持:

今天我学了
我最喜欢的饮料
可乐和橙汁

That means
Today I learned
My favorite drinks are
Coke and orange juice

Cinquain

Yeezus:

Yeezys
Comfortable, Hype
Not for running, only for walking and talking
On my feet in my dreams
Expensive

Haiku

Willie Mays:

All time great… there he goes!
Like a fly escaping the swatter
Running, running, gone

My Fact to Fiction Piece

Fact to Fiction Story:

My tank was on. I checked my regulator. Everything was working. I turned my flashlight on and entered the water. It was colder than in the day, but not by much. The island I was on only had two seasons: summer, and hurricane season.

I signaled ok to the instructor and put my head under the water. I couldn’t see much, as the only light was the other divers flashlights. Tureen, the instructor said that we could start our descent. One meter, two meters, three meters… 12 meters.

The bottom. Now we could see a lot more. It is almost like there are two different ecosystems that have shifted. The first shift is the things that you expect to see, and the second shift is more sea urchins, sharks, sting ray, sea turtles, squid and more. It’s crazy to see the change. We swam around for a bit before Tureen motioned for everybody to turn off their lights and be still. The uncountable amounts of plankton started to light up. They were like stars in the sky. It was beautiful. After, I quickly pointed my flashlight at a rock. Anybody who was just glancing at it would not have noticed it. It was the fin of a fish, just part of it. The first thought that registered through my head was barracuda, as you commonly see them off the coast of St. Barth. It probably was. They eat other fish. But the marks on the fin were farther apart. I had a nagging suspicion in the back of my head. Shark. Not a nurse shark or something small, a great white. They are extremely rare in St. Barth, but Tureen has bumped into them before. A few seconds later, I saw a trail of blood. I knew I was right. You can’t talk when you are diving, so I would have to signal that it was there. If I gave the symbol that means you see a shark, which is always a nurse shark or a blue shark, he would think it was one of those. I needed to figure out a way to signal great white shark. I swam over to Tureen and tapped his shoulder. I put my hand on my head like it was a fin, (the symbol for the sharks I commonly see) and then took my arms and made them look like giant jaws. He got the point. He got everybody together, which took about 10 minutes. Just then some of our lights were blocked out. I looked up. There it was. Not five feet above me. A 12 foot long great white shark. I pointed up and gradually everybody turned their heads. Even in the dim light, I could still barely make out the looks on people’s faces. Scared. Horrified. They probably think that they are going to die. I think that I might too, but we are underwater and in a group so the shark probably won’t approach us. Probably.

Just in case the shark attacks, it’s better to get back on the boat. But that will take some time as your body needs to decompress. I can see the gears in Tureens mind working overtime. I glance at somebody’s pressure gauge, the way you can tell how much air you have. It is already in the reserve air. That’s true for probably everybody except Tureen. I look at mine. It’s in reserve too. He puts us into groups of three. My group has Tureen, so we go up last. We go three by three, the shark circling around us. Each time it comes around its laps got shorter. And shorter, and shorter. I start to go up. So does the rest of my group. We stop to decompress and start our rise to the surface again. We do this a few times. My dad is the first to break the surface in my group. Then me. Then Tureen. I swim as fast as I can to the boat. I don’t even take my fins off. Everybody’s faces are a deathly white, and they are telling stories about what they saw and what they felt. I got a coke and walked to the bow. I was the only person there. We started moving. I was getting sprayed with spindrift as we started going faster. Tureen walked over to me and said a quick thank you.

THE END

This is the first piece we wrote this year, and it is my favorite. This is a bad thing because to me it says that I have not improved that much over the course of the year. That could be true, because I do not like creative writing and I don’t give it my all. I do really like this piece because scuba diving is one of my favorite things to do, and over spring break I got a better certification that is also international.

2nd Quarter Humanities Reflection

image (1)my castle drawing————————^

I am proud of my castle drawing. I had to start over, but when I finished I think that I did really well. I listed a lot of important parts of a castle.

My Parzival Essay was challenging because I had to do it without talking to a teacher. I stayed up late one night to finish it, but it came through. I worked at my grandparents house and I worked on the plane home. Here is my Parzival Essay:

Parzival was raised by a mom who did not want him to succeed, and that led to many bumps on the long road to his “success.” In the book Parzival, The Quest of the Grail Knight, Parzival was quickly set up to fail by his mother. Parzival suffered greatly and was negatively impacted as a result. He was so ignorant that it took him a long time to develop the skills to learn on his own. In addition, Parzival’s upbringing hindered him in life because this negative reinforcement it made it very hard for him to succeed.

 

Parzival’s upbringing made it so that he was isolated and did not know anything about the outside world. He also did not receive any help for his journey, and in fact was setup for disappointment. Over the course of many years, he continually encountered roadblocks. A good example of this is when Parzival didn’t know his own name.  On page 3 it reads, “The only home the boy had ever known was a cottage in the wilderness of Soltane, and the only parent he had ever known was his mother.   He was never called by his proper name; indeed he didn’t even know that he had one.” The fact that Parzival did not even know that he had a proper name is evidence of ignorance during his upbringing.

 

Parzival’s upbringing hindered him in life because he was ignorant. For example on pages 13-14, the book reads, ‘“Good day my lady,” he said.  “My mother told me to give a cheery greeting to everyone I meet.  And to take a ring from a good lady if the occasion arose.”  The duchess was so frightened she hardly knew how to reply.  She begged the stranger to go away and leave her alone.  But he took her ring and helped himself to the broach he found on her gown.”  Another example is on pages 7 to 8, “He threw himself face first upon the ground, blocking the path of the great horses.  “If you be God”, he cried, “be merciful to me!”  The startled knights jerked their reins and stopped their horses just short of the boy’s’ body.  “Fool”, they cried.  “Do you want to be killed?”  But the boy was not offended.  “Tell me, “ he said “are you the one called God?”  The knights were amazed.  Who was this ignorant boy who mistook three knights for God.” When he took the brooch from the duchess, he misquoted his mother, who never said take anything from a women, but to accept one if presented. This provides further proof of his ignorance. The  later quote said that Parzival was ignorant, perfectly saying the point: Parzival’s upbringing hindered him in life because he was ignorant.

 

Because of Parzival’s upbringing, he was unaware of religion and the importance that it had in the world. Religion played a major role in the medieval era, and Parzival knew nothing about it. If that was ever discovered, he could have been punished severely.  While this the same example that was used before, it proves this point too. On pg. 8 it says,  ‘“Fool”, they cried.  “Do you want to be killed?”  But the boy was not offended.  “Tell me, “ he said “are you the one called God?”  The knights were amazed.  Who was this ignorant boy who mistook three knights for God.”’  Another example is ‘“There is another who is the lord of Hell.  He is called the devil and you must flee from him, for he is the father of treachery and despair.”’ on pg. 6. This has a hidden meaning. It is basically saying that you must flee from the devil, which comes to someone when someone does something bad. If somebody does something bad, even as small not knowing about religion, they could get punished if someone ever finds out. The first piece of evidence was literally a knight saying that you could get killed by not knowing about God.

 

 

Because Parzival’s poor upbringing hindered him in life, he was ignorant,  he took a while to grasp onto life, and he could have been severely punished for not knowing about religion. It took him two tries to save the king from the greatest pain anyone has ever felt, and if he was brought up properly, it is evident that that he would have saved the king from the most horrid pain the first time, while not being shunned by practically everybody he knew. Although Parzival’s mother provided him major setbacks, it seems certain that he would have saved the king earlier, would have been reunited with his wife earlier, and everybody would be happier as a result.

Beowulf Annotations

In Beowulf we annotated for the first time. We wrote chapter summaries, defined vocabulary and underlined important parts of the book. Annotating is important and helpful because when you have to look back on the book, everything that you need to find is highlighted. You can also read a sentence and know what a whole chapter was about with chapter summaries. My chapter summaries were very helpful when we wrote our Point of View piece because I could easily find what I was looking for, and I am proud of that. I would like to improve on seeing what needs to be underlined, and what doesn’t.

Beowulf Drawing Project

This is my  Beowulf Drawing project. We were put in a group and assigned a character. I was assigned Unferth along with my groupmates Liam and Marlo H. I am really proud of our groups group work, which led to a lot of creativity like the apples saying Unferth. What I found challenging was getting to the final product. The group had disagreements about what the setting should be, and who should draw what. I also thought that so much happened to Unferth in a short time, so we had to be flexible and change our ideas.