I met with Anka at Strozier last Tuesday. For this
session I had Anka do some intensive reading with Maya Angelou’s poem “Kin”.
The poem was about family, life, death, and parenting—all the while being written
with cyclical symbolism, like the water cycle (which represented the circle of
life). He was very impressed with the poem since so many words stood for
different things other than their literal meaning. There were about three words
that I had to define for him, but other than that, the intensive reading fit his
level of analysis and comprehension. There was a lot of rereading and explaining
about certain combinations of words, such as “red rings” being a makeshift
phrase that stood for twin umbilical cords. Anka also learned a new phrase:
blue and black. I had to explain to him that to be blue and black is to be
bruised or severely beaten. All in all, Anka seemed to have a lot of fun reading
the poems. He even told me later that he had shown it to his wife over Skype, since
she also speaks English, and that she liked the symbolism as well.
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