An Apple A Day

Aloha mai kākou! 🙂 I hope you all have been having a lovely week so far!

Every Wednesday for about half a year now, I have been volunteering with the Hawaiʻi Literacy program. This group focuses on helping people gain the knowledge and skills needed through literacy and other services in low-income housing. I specifically volunteer with the Family Literacy Libraries program at Mayor Wright Housing, working with mostly Micronesian children ranging from preschool through middle school.

The wonderful part of this program (besides working with these amazing kids) is that besides literacy, we focus each month on a different unit. Some units so far have included learning about nature, goal-making, and holidays. Since April is National Poetry Month, it’s fitting that our unit this month related to different styles of poetry. Today, we taught the kids about concept poetry, and they made their own poems describing pictures through what that object could see, hear, feel, touch, and taste 🙂

The volunteers are more than welcome to do the different activities as well, and I decided to take a picture of an apple. Instead of describing the actual apple itself, I kind of went a little off topic (and a bit overboard with the actual assignment itself). I’ve decided to share a picture of my final product plus the poem I ended up writing within my apple 🙂

An Apple A Day

An apple of day keeps the doctors away,

But can an apple heal a heartache?

Can the deepest hues of red and green

Equate the deepest hues of the heart?

A heart once singing the sweetest melodies

Of timeless love songs

Now wailing the bluest country tunes.

Can the shape of an apple

Equate the shape of a heart?

Maybe while in love,

But what happens once that love disappears?

Will that heart crumble

Within the chambers of your chest?

And what about the sweetness of an apple?

Can the sweetness of apples

Equate the sweetness of romance?

A love, once sweeter than sugar,

Can easily turn sour to the tongue

The minute he whispers,

“I don’t love you anymore.”

Apples are solid.

They are unable to feel in the same manner

A living, breathing, LOVING soul can.

For even though an apple a day

Can keep the doctors away,

No amount of sweet apple

Can mend a broken heart

Once it shatters.

 

Happy Poetry Month, everyone!

Me ke aloha,
Mauri