This week’s Listening World comes to us from Sagirah Shahid, a teaching-writer with Unrestricted Interest who has worked extensively with students at the South Education Center. Sagirah says, “I love reading poetry and I’m so, so grateful to have the opportunity to read the poetry of UI poets every week.”
The first time Jordan and I met, it was remotely. Our camera screens revealing bits of our respective living rooms, an intimacy that still felt a bit awkward during early quarantine. It was March of 2020 and the school administrators of South Education Center had reached a point of navigating the logistics of distance-teaching under quarantine that allowed for Unrestricted Interest to resume our work of honoring creativity.
There was an instant connection between Jordan and I. I admired Jordan’s expertise in video gaming, we talked a lot about our families and that led us to a conversation about power. What does it mean to be powerful? What is power?
The question felt intensified by our new pandemic realities. Power is love, Jordan told me through the video screen. Jordan said their mom taught them that lesson, by the way she loved them. Jordan’s poem “Best Stories of Our Lives” reminds me that regardless of circumstance, regardless of the things we can or can’t control, there is power in how we love and in how we choose to remember our beloveds. Power is love.
*******
In Jordan’s poem I see these tender vignettes of a life. It’s powerful to feel the love of Jordan’s mom radiate through Jordan’s memory. Throughout the poem, the love and the memory of love is ongoing. Often Jordan refers to their mom in the present tense, a reminder I think, of how infinite love is. Power is love. I don’t know about you, but I most certainly feel more powerful and more loved after reading this poem.
Jordan’s poem was included in the South Education Center’s 2019-2020 school anthology Butterflies Following the Sun. You can read more of Jordan’s work in the anthology alongside other youth poets from South Education Center.
*Since the publication of this anthology Jordan has recently let us know that their name is Jordan. In older editions of this anthology, Jordan wrote their poems under the name “Anna”.
Jordan your poem is incredibly moving and powerful just like your love!