The day I heard poetry call
I am in seventh-grade language arts class in an upstairs room in the old red-brick junior high school building. The afternoon sun streams through high windows that face onto the playground and athletic fields. It is the day I remember hearing this phrase for the first time: “the little/ lame balloonman.”
It’s from “In Just-,” the E.E. Cummings poem we are reading in our anthology. Mr. Katz is
