Flower on a Crowded Subway

The penultimate poem in our summer series, Is Poetry Motion?, is by Martin Jacobvitz, one of the students to whom Kenneth Koch taught poetry at PS 61 in 1968. Koch used poems he loved, like Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," as models and inspirations for the children's poems. As he writes in, Rose Where Did You Get That Red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children, "They wrote remarkably well."

(Source: KennethKoch.org)

Five Ways of Looking at a Flower

          1
Sitting on a chair
Among gray buildings
Is a flower.

          2
People of New York
Imagine the country?
Can they see a flower
On a crowded subway?

          3
Waving wind
Moving a small plant
A bright shining sun
Paints the shadow of a large flower.

          4
A flower is embedded
My thoughts are with it
So are an insect's.

          5
The flower wilted to the the ground,
It was the finish of many things.