Stonecoast Review
The Literary Journal of the Stonecoast MFA
Ms. Peters and the Thousand Paper Cranes
By Joanne Durham
How can I make the world a better place while I’m still alive?
–Sadako Sasaki, Hiroshima
After Ms. Peters’ purple dresses sagged
on her frail frame, her cough interrupted each lilting phrase,
but she held her students rapt in folds of story,
enchanted them with wise trees and humble spiders.
When she stopped teaching, I read the children
Sadako’s story — how the Enola Gay flew over her house
when she was two, how it took ten years
for her body to crumble, how she crafted
a thousand origami cranes to fly in her hospital room.
After Elmer began, all the kids chimed in:
shaped winged messengers of hope
from notebook paper, brought old House and Gardens
from home, scraps of Christmas foil, begged
to skip recess to finish their creations.
After the workers came, stripped asbestos
from the classroom ceilings,
we hung a thousand cranes from those tiles
throughout the school.
When the cranes arrived at her bedside,
Ms. Peters stroked each fold with fingernails
still brightly polished. After that,
the children asked brilliant questions
I couldn’t answer.
JOANNE DURHAM is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022) and the chapbook, On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay 2023). Recent awards include the 2023 Third Wednesday Magazine’s Annual Poetry Prize, the Mary Ruffin Poole Prize from the NC Poetry Society, and three Pushcart nominations. Her poetry appears in Poetry South, Poetry East, Whale Road Review, Writers Resist, CALYX, and many other journals and anthologies. She lives on the North Carolina coast, with the ocean as her backyard and muse. Visit her at https://www.joannedurham.com/.
This poem originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 21.
Photo by Jason Leung
