Below are 5 of my favorite poems that I wrote this year in humanities:

Dreams:

Nexus, Nexus, Nexus

That’s all I get to say

Until the people come and change me

It’s “Introducing the new Nexus 5X”

Not many people pay attention to me

Maybe someone will listen soon

Oh! Here’s a kid. Maybe he’s listening to me!

No, he’s just taking a photo

Maybe he’ll buy a phone because of me

I doubt it

Maybe I’ll be a big billboard one day

Not a little bus station ad

I can have dreams too

Big dreams

I can be a billboard president

I could have a pictures of the greats on me

The I-mac,

Madame Tussauds,

KFC,

And maybe the New York Mets

But those are just dreams

They probably won’t happen

So I’m just stuck here forever

And ever

And ever

Until someone starts to realise

We aren’t just advertisement

We have lives

We have dreams

And they can all come true.

6 AM:

I wake up early

Damn alarm clock I hate you

Snooze bar is the best

Afterlife:

Why cling to a suffering life

When you could cling to your amazing afterlife

Where no one ever dies

Where no one ever lives

There is just peace

You may be reborn

Or stay in your paradise

As long as you look good in His eyes

You will never suffer

And He will give you

Another and another and another life

My poem in the style of Emily:
6 A.M.

The horrendous train

The lone person sleeps in peace

I am alone too

Strangers/Commute:

I see the hand move

I did not see his face well

My wallet is gone

In humanities we read a book called Shabanu, which is about a 12 year old girl living in Pakistan in the 70’s. We had to write an essay about the book, and I chose to write about how living in the desert for Shabanu is a lot harder than living in NYC. We did our body paragraphs first, and then intro/conclusion. We used a TEEAC format, which is:

Topic Sentence

Explanation

Evidence

Analysis

Conclusion.

Here is the link of my first draft of the body paragraphs:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xf-W8MqS7o6gF03D85b6I5GMn8rssaSnLZwiqF-DEnI/edit?usp=sharing

After the body paragraphs, we made our intro and conclusion paragraphs, which I wrote on the doc below, which turned into my final essay. Below is the link for my final Shabanu essay:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ptx4GthdzEijII2eNkOuWaOs2Ytf_3wH2hw3h1UEiGA/edit?usp=sharing

This is our Shabanuws! Real Estate edition video!

Video

Here is our script for the video:

Freddie: Welcome back to Shabanuws: Real Estate Edition! I am Amu Kamat reporting from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. Today my fellow colleague, Tamak Uma, will be showing the very wealthy American Adam Soldairs, around a very fine mud house. Over to you, Tamak.

Will: Thank you, Amu. Now we will start the tour with Adam.  

Armant: Thank you Tamak, I’ve traveled far and wide to find the perfect house, and this might just be it.

Will: Now we have the entrance, a very grand and well built house. Did I mention, it has a very good door?

Armant: So if you want a place without any visitors, and no civilization for miles, then would this be the place?

Will: Yes, but watch out for Nazir Mohammed, he umm, he doesn’t exactly like people very much… Anyway, let’s go inside, I’m burning out here!

Will: Here is the main bathroom. It’s very nice, for it has a toilet and sink!

Armant: Very nice indeed. Can we pause for a second, I want to, uhh try out the bathroom.

Will: sorry for the interruption. Now, we are in the bedroom.

Armant: Quite a nice bedroom here, good bed, almost soundproof walls, and very relaxing. How solid are the walls though?

Will: As solid as mud can be.

Armant: I may have misheard you… did you say mud?

Will: The walls are almost entirely mud.

Armant: So then very fragile-(Screen buzzing thing)

Either we go to a different room or we go back to Freddie

Auntie is my least favorite Aunt. She is always grumps and going on and on about how Mama should have had sons instead of Phulan and I. “If God had blessed you with sons, we wouldn’t have to break our fingers over wedding dresses.” page 3. She also is married to Uncle, who works with the government. He visits some times and brings us presents because he is very rich. Although Auntie is married to a nice man and has 2 sons, she is always ungrateful. She hates helping around the house, and never smiles. God sends miracles when she smiles. If only Auntie was nicer, than living in the desert wouldn’t be as hard.

This is a picture of what I think Auntie looks like:

This is a sculpture of Auntie made by Io and Tilda:

“A puppy with a large, round belly and soft brown fur picks at my fingers with sharp teeth. … I hand the wriggly thing(Sher Dil) back to him(Dadi).” page 68. That is how I would describe Sher Dil. He’s a cute puppy that is a little fat and always with energy. I love watching him play with the boys. It is like he’s their third brother. He is also very good at organizing the camels. I was amazed when he got all of the camels into a special formation when we were leaving Mehrabpur. He not only got them into the formation, but he also calmed them down so the landlord Nazir wouldn’t find us from the camels loud noise. He is almost good enough to replace Guluband. I still miss Guluband.

This is a picture I found that looks like how I pictured Sher Dil:

source: http://www.polyvore.com/animals/collection?id=1696455

This is a drawing I made of how I picture Sher Dil:

In humanities this April, which is poetry month, we started writing poetry. We started by Dave sharing a doc of how to write different poems. It was called Various Poetry Activities. It explained how to write haikus, which are my favorite, memory poems and a lot more. We would then choose a type of poem to write, and using the rules of how to write it, write it. I’ve done mostly haikus, but I have also done memory poems. The first poem we wrote had to be a haiku, and I worked with Zach and Miles. We had inspiration from Zach, because he always breaks his phone.

MyPhone:

Phone’s are great friends, but

We all smash them way too much.

And then we feel dead.

In the next class we were allowed to do any poem we wanted to. I wrote a memory poem about the Mets winning a world series game. The next class we did a New York Times poetry competition haiku that had to be about NYC. There was 5 categories: Commute, strangers, 6am, the island, and one other. My favorite was a 6am one I wrote. It was about how I hate getting up for school in the morning.

6 AM:

I wake up early

Damn alarm clock I hate you

Snooze bar is the best
A strength I had with this was thinking of the idea of the poem. That is always the easiest part for me. A challenge I had was expressing it in words. Each line of the poems I normally write 3 or 4 times before I got a good one out. My goal is to not write just haikus and to try some other types of poems.