Poetry Friday: "The Burning of Books"

Picture of poet Bertolt Brecht

This week's Poetry Friday lesson is inspired by events that are happening in our world right now. As I've heard more and more about the pastor in Florida who is planning to burn a copy of the Quran, which is the holy text in the Muslim faith. The pastor is planning to burn this book (or more than one, I'm not sure) in memorial of the tragic events of 9/11 and in protest against the building of a mosque near Ground Zero (where the Twin Towers were located).

As I've followed this story, I cannot help but think of the book burnings conducted by the Nazi's during WWII. Of course, events are not exactly the same, but they do have some commonalities. We talked about these issues in class today and took down the poem "The Burning of Books" by Bertolt Brecht.

For our Personal Creed Project, we are collecting our beliefs every day. At the end of the year, these belief statements will come together to form a creative vision of who you are and what you think. Today's belief statement was about the freedom of speech. You all wrote down a few sentences about whether or not you believe that this is a freedom that should be available to all, whether you believe in what people have to say or not.

We also read a little from Night and took down the meaning of the word Gestapo on our bookmarks.