Speaking From the Heart

ONE TENDS TO BE suspicious of children's poetry books simply because they seem a little self-righteous. Their very existence implies ignorance of boorishness on the part of the reader, as if to say, "You don't realize the child's talent, but here is overwhelming evidence to throw in your face. " The impulse is to brace oneself for the challenge prepare to read the most astonishing and brilliant verse ever written by a child.

I Will Always Stay Me: Writing of Migrant Children would seem an ideal opportunity for a soapbox edition of children's poetry. A collaboration between Robert Coles, Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities, and Sherry Kafka, a former Loeb Fellow, the anthology was born in a creative workshop program in South Texas elementary and high schools, where most of the students are from Mexican immigrant families and speak English as a foreign language. And yet Kafka's preface immediately clears the book of any charge of smugness: "The selections...were chosen because they were the most representative of the writing we received," she says, "not because they were the best. "If the purpose of I Will Always Stay Me is not merely to impress, its editors must have something more in mind.

What Coles and Kafka offer is definitely something more than a poetry anthology-it is a refreshing approach to social studies. The book actually examines Mexican immigrant culture in South Texas through the eyes of its children, its most honest and innocent citizens. Aged six to 17, the children reveal about their lives everything from their daily activities of school and migrant from labor to the many shocking realities they must face, as well as their ambitions for and fears of the future.

Much of I Will Always Stay Me has an unnerving quality. Coles and Kafka have organized the material into a kind of generic mental process, in which the subjects gradually progress from nature and animals to more shocking views of drug abuse, and finally toward an inner view of the children's mental development and emotions. On the concrete level, the poems on nature vary from abstract haiku about the moon and the stars to short descriptive passages about the fearful side of nature.

Suddenly the rain poured. The trees fell, trash came floated down the street, and papers were swimming everywhere. Dirty water and mud were inside our home. We hurried to Laredo in a small boat. I felt like I was going to die. I was worried about my family. I felt bad because i don't know if. I would still have a house left when i got back. Rouie Agwire, grade 7

THE PART OF TEXAS in which these children live, work play and write is not the stark and barren flatland of cliche. Instead the area, generally termed the "Hill Country", is one of the more beautiful parts of Texas packed with culture and "warm material" for the imagination to feed on: it does not suffer from the dryness that afflicts other parts of the state. The starkness resides, instead, in the meager conditions under which these children must live.

All the poetry that appears contradicts the commonplace theory that poverty makes people meager in spirit as well. On the contrary these children reveal their imagination with honesty and innocence. Many of them-even the first graders-must miss days of school in order to work picking crops to help the family out financially.

The poems and drawings of the children about their work reveal the way they accept farm labor as part of their daily life from early childhood. In the summer they work all day in the fields: being children, they find the job fun. One sixth grader from San Antonio writes:

When I was working on the fields we picked pickles and I was always the last one. I had fun and I was always playing. When we finished there, we went to pick cherries and I was always eating.

Well that's all I can say about my life. But I will always keep my memories about the fields they will always stay with me.

Most of the poems in the section entitled "So you see it takes a lot of work," are light, simple and clear. The tone belies the disturbing fact that most of these children are no more than 12 years old, yet have worked long enough to consider it the main activity of their lives, a solid part of their memories, rather than games and play time which predominate the memories of most American children.

BY FAR the most interesting and unnerving section of the book is "I seem to be what I am", a collection of poems which comprise a general introspective search about the child's reactions to life Buried in these poems is the evidence of some of the brutal realities these children face. Many of them closely witness the drug traffic from the border, and the contact takes its toll:

I have this friend that is a drug addict. She is always looking for someone to buy her drugs...I don't let her take anything when she is with my other friends. I hope that one of these days she gets off drugs.

My other friends also take drugs. I hope that my friends get off drugs. I don't know if they are still doing it because i haven't talked to them since my mother and father will get mad at me if I do.   Eve Torves, grade 6

Another story. "I had a friend Named Bobby" creates a lasting picture of a "very smart and very talented" boy.

Every day I always met Bobby in front of the school building and everyday. I noticed he had a different bruise on his face or arms and sometimes on his neck. Everyday it was the same story he always fell from something.   Carmel Zavala, grade 7 Crystal City.

Eventually, the narrator hears Bobby's scream for help: "Dad please stop, I'm sorry, I'm sorry please stop! "His father just yelled at him saying. "Shut up boy, you'll pay for what you did!" Finally the man went inside leaving behind a boy crying in pain and fear," writes the seventh grader. Zavala writes without sentimentality but with feeling: the strength in her writing is characteristic of the book.

For Coles the work is an offshoot of Volume IV of his "Children of Crisis" series in which he studied Chicanos, Eskimos and Indians. But he says he became involved with I Will Always Stay Me for an added reason: he thought it would be important to the people of Texas and the Southwest. "What children have to offer us is so put down upon by the theorists. Who tell us what children can and cannot do and tell us all the stages and periods and everything and here is the evidence, here's what they have to say. I wish people would pay attention to that and stop imposing their high faulting ideas." He explains that the point of I Will Always Stay Me is to reveal a social truth which theorists cannot argue against: "All too often social sciences and social studies are theoretical formulation or they are people going off and handing people computer cards," Coles explains adding. "As you go through the literature of so called child development or moral development, you find that all children share with migrant children a similar sort of academic fate which is a consequence of the deliberate refusal of certain 'experts' to acknowledge that a boy of ten say and a girl of nine, are quite able to take stock of the world normally get to the heart of its values and assumptions.

"These are children in the school room, writing. And they show us something about abstraction such as poverty and the way we deal with poverty and childhood and the way we deal with childhood. There's always that tension between that imagination and that power of the mind and then the horrible world, closing off more and more doors. Now the danger of this is you can romanticize, you can fasten on to this in such a way that, politically, it can be used to say. "Now look how wonderful these kids are. Who wants to bother with them?"

On one level, I Will Always Stay Me is enjoyable for its light and serious poems both of which are truly unpretentious. But on a more important level the collection is a "social study" in the treat sense. No parapsychologist interpreters the poetry or points out the important social conditions revealed within them. The children of South Texas speak directly to us, and from them we learn the most.