 Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We are here. My name is Morgan and I am a youth services librarian with San Francisco Public Library. I have some folks helping today. Ileana is our chat monitor. So chat away please enter your questions and comments in the chat because Ileana will be checking them. Please let us know where you're tuning in from. We have folks that are tuning in from all over the place. And to begin, thank you for being here. We have a great program planned for you today. And I am joining you from San Francisco. And I would like to acknowledge that I am on the unceded land of the Ramatush El Noni people. And if you would like to learn more about the land that you live on and the people that came before you, the library is a great place to start. Today's program is part of Summer Stride. Yay Summer Stride. Our annual summer learning program. And it is made possible by friends of the San Francisco Public Library. A big old thank you to our friends. Thank you, thank you. And this is just one of hundreds of virtual programs that fostered the love of reading and learning. So for more information on all the programs we have all summer long, go ahead and go to our website sfpl.org. So we have a super program for you today. I'm really excited and honored to have our guest with us today. She is joining us from far away. Please ask lots of questions. It's a great way to learn. We're going to be talking about poetry today. And like I said, you can type your questions into the chat, but we're going to save some time I think at the end for questions. Zetta Elliott, she is here with us today. She has written many wonderful books for young people of all ages, including A Place Inside of Me, A Poem to Heal the Hearts. I have it right here. So we are honored that she's joining us today. She is a poet and an author and a professor and a kind and interesting person. So please give her a warm, warm, warm, warm welcome and a big smile. Yay to our guest author Zetta Elliott. Thank you so much for that lovely introduction, Morgan. Good afternoon, everybody. It is a very rainy day here in Evanston, Illinois, kind of gray and gloomy. But I find that that is a perfect day for writing, especially to write some poetry. So what we're going to do this afternoon, I am going to read to you A Place Inside of Me. And then I'm going to share my screen in a different way. And I have a slideshow that will help you write some poetry. And we are going to celebrate joy, which I think is a good thing to do on a rainy day. It's a good thing to do on any day, really. But it's also a really good way to think about and sort through your emotions. There's been kind of a lot of bad news lately and some pretty upsetting things in the news. And when I get upset, I write poetry and I find it helps. So you are going to need a pen or a pencil and a piece of paper a little bit later on for the first few minutes. We're just going to read the story. So give me just a second and I will share my screen. Here we go. All right. I'm going to get back. No, going the wrong way. Here we go. All right. I'm going to minimize this. So I can't see anybody, but that gives you more of my screen. A Place Inside of Me, a poem to heal the heart. This is a story I wrote 20 years ago. And it took a very long time to find an editor who gave us the thumbs up and decided they were going to make this story into a book. And I'm so glad they did. My editor was Grace Kendall, and she picked Noah Denman to make the illustrations. Believe it or not, this is Noah's first book. And it is absolutely beautiful. It is so beautiful that she won the Honor Award, the Caldecott Prize Honor Award, which is the biggest prize you can win for illustration. I'm so proud that her beautiful shiny silver sticker is on the cover of our book. So I'm going to go to the first page, which includes our dedications. And I'll read mine. For Zion and all the children who missed the hand they used to hold, trust that you will laugh again and love again once your heart has had time to heal. And it is called a poem to heal the heart. Zion is an African American boy whose aunt, Atatiana Jefferson, was killed by police, killed while they were playing video games at home, which I think is just an awful thing for anyone to go through. But you know, a lot of us in this past year, especially with the pandemic, have lost someone we've loved or we haven't been able to be with the people we love. And so I'm dedicating this book. I hope it really is the kind of poem that helps you think about your emotions, honor your emotions, and then begin to heal. So you can see that the boy in this book, he has Pet Cat, who follows him everywhere. He also lives in a city I was living in Philadelphia when this book was being made. Noah was living in Philadelphia. So if you've ever been to Philly, you might recognize some of these buildings, they look familiar. There is a place inside of me. A space deep down inside of me where all my feelings hide. They wait there in the darkness, a knot of electric emotion, seething, sizzling, burning until I find the strength to reach inside. There is joy inside of me, a happiness deep down inside of me that glows bright and warm as the sun and shines delight on everything I see. So what makes this boy happy? Playing basketball with his friends. But then there is sorrow inside of me, a sadness deep down inside of me that is cold and dark as a watery grave at the bottom of the sea. So the boy was happy and then he went to the barber shop to get his hair done. But you know, there's a TV on, and then there's a news report that a girl has been shot by the police. And now the boy feels something different. There is fear inside of me, a terror deep down inside of me that stalks me like a sinister shadow and seeps like poison into my dreams. You can see his cat is curled up sleeping peacefully, but the boy is not. He looks pretty scared, right? And there are red and blue lights swirling in his bedroom because outside is a police car. Now some people feel safer when the police are around, but not everybody. There is anger inside of me, a fury deep down inside of me that is sharp enough to slice through air, flesh, bone and concrete. Now this boy, like a lot of people last year were upset about police brutality. And so they made signs that say Black Lives Matter and they marched peacefully because that's their right. But sometimes there were police at the rallies too and that led to conflict. And yet there is hunger inside of me, a yearning deep down inside of me that refuses to be silenced or bound with chains and insists on being free. So the boy went and he climbed to the very top of the playground and he looks down and he sees everybody in his community playing together, having fun. Then he's at school, he's giving a presentation, there is pride inside of me. No shame deep down inside of me for I know how long and hard we have struggled and against all odds my people have emerged strong, triumphant and beautiful. I'm going to go back to this illustration. I wonder how many of these people you recognize, they're famous African Americans. If we start in the right hand corner at the top, that's Maya Angelou, below her is Malcolm X, Louis Armstrong playing his trumpet, Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in outer space, Jackie Robinson with his baseball bat, that's Dr. Martin Luther King and next to him the queen Beyonce and next to her the Supremes. Now this picture is interesting because Noah used some of her own relatives as models for the characters that she painted. And so we start off with kids in the front and then elders and older people and then if you look right in the back, she went back to Africa and represented her ancestors. There is peace inside of me, a calm deep down inside of me that flows through my soul like a tranquil stream and hushes my whispering doubts. I decided to try a meditation challenge during the pandemic and to just sit for 15 minutes and try not to focus on anything else but my breathing. You could try that sometimes too. It helps you feel centered. There is compassion inside of me, a tenderness deep down inside of me that tries to heal the wounds of the past and to forgive in spite of the lingering pain. So the boy feels compassion and he's comforting one of his friends who's also upset about the girl who was shot. There is still hope inside of me, a promise deep down inside of me that I will use my life to help others and they will help me in return. This is called a candlelight vigil. Everybody has a candle and some people they're praying. Some people are sharing a memory of the girl who was killed. They brought flowers and a teddy bear for there is love inside of me, true love deep down inside of me. I am in love with my people, all people plus trees, sparrows, sunlight and the rain that falls like a blessing from above. I love birds and I have a bird feeder right outside my window and sparrows just like these ones come to my window all day. Love it. And when I look inside of me to that place deep down inside of me, I remember to love myself most of all. I hope you remember to love yourself because that's where it begins. We love ourselves and love radiates outward and touches everyone around us. All right, thank you for listening to my book. I'm going to stop sharing this screen and I'm going to share the other screen. Okay, we are ready to write some poetry. So I hope you have a pen or a pencil and a piece of paper ready. We are going to celebrate joy. We are also going to learn about what I call a tool of the trade. If you are a writer and you would like to be a writer or a poet, you're going to need some tools in your tool bag. I keep them in my tool bag and I pull them out whenever I'm writing. We're going to talk about similes today. And there were a couple of similes in the book that I just read. Maybe you noticed. So we're going to start off with a warm-up called word association. It's really fun. I have my phone right beside me and I'm going to pull up my stopwatch because word association is a timed activity. You need a piece of paper and a pen or a pencil. I'd like you to write the numbers one to 10 down the side of your page down the margin. And then you're going to wait for the prompt. Now the prompt is one word on the next screen. So we're not there yet. Next slide, rather. So once you see that word, I want you to write as fast as you can. Don't worry about your spelling. You're not handing this in. You can share your words at the very end if you want to but you don't have to. And I'm going to ask you to write one word next to each number. So one, two, three, four. If you can get more than 10 words before time is up, then keep going. All right. So don't write anything down. I'm just going to give you an example. If I said school, think about all the words that would pop into your head. Teacher, classmate, cafeteria, remote computer, stress, recess, phys ed, math. You could think of all of those words and write them down. Okay. Does that make sense? I hope everybody understands. All right. I've got my stopwatch ready. You have one minute to write down as many words as you can that pop into your head when you think about joy. What makes you happy? Write down everything that makes you happy as fast as you can. Maybe it's a color. Maybe it's an activity. Maybe it's a food. Maybe you're happy when you're with a certain person or an animal. Maybe there's a game or an activity that you like. You don't have to worry about your spelling. You're just writing as fast as you can. You can also draw a picture if it's hard to write words. That's okay. You have 30 seconds left. Oh, so many things make me happy. Those sparrows that come to my window. Sometimes there's a rainbow after a rainy day. My kitchen smells nice because I just roasted a sweet potato. Sweet things make me happy. 10 seconds left. Oh, five, four, three, two, one. That is one minute. All right. So now I'm going to see if I can open up the chat because this is a way that I can see your answers because I think it's a little difficult for you to unmute. I don't even know if you can unmute right now. I think we're saving that to the very end when we do Q&A. So if you would like to share three of your words, three of the words that you wrote down, please put them in the chat and I can read them out loud. And it's okay if we end up with some of the same words. The things that make you happy. Friends, thank you, Eleanor. Absolutely. Friends, smile, warm, dogs, camping and swimming, birds, water and voices. Yes, very nice. Anything else? Food. Good grades. Yeah, that makes me happy, especially if I don't have to do the grading. Hugs. Morgan, very nice. Especially some of us now. We can hug. It's been a year. Kindness and safety. Thank you, Timothy. What other things make you happy? We've got some animals, some activities. Mateo says sports, good. Family, pink and birds. Nice. Are there any foods? Children's sunshine and a spring breeze. Yeah, food, definitely. I love Senegalese food. Oh, Elaine, ice cream. I ordered a box of four pints of ice cream. That really wasn't a good idea, but it was very tasty. Books, time, the ocean. Yeah. Reading definitely makes me happy. The playground. Oh, swings. I feel free and happy on a swing. The beach is opening up. Love to feel hot sand between my toes. Clouds. Absolutely. Anybody else? When you watch someone else get happy over something, that is so true, Pauline. Happiness is contagious and sometimes you're not feeling happy and then you hear somebody laughing and that makes you laugh. All right, we have sunshine as well. Puppies, absolutely. Morning tea, family hikes and tacos. Yes to tacos. Family hikes sound fun too. Oh, dancing, the beach and quiet. Nothing makes me happier than to be in my apartment when I'm writing and it's totally quiet. Orange blossom honey. Yum, that sounds good. Wow. I like peanut butter and honey sandwiches. I like honey in my mint tea. Oh, it's good that so many things can make us happy, right? I think we realize now after we've been apart for a year and unable to go out for a year, I love going to see museums and I haven't been at museums in such a long time. I'm looking forward to going to those again. Being near the lake makes me happy. Yeah. All right. If we don't have any more words, then I am going to move us forward. Oh, strawberry cake. Yes. Yes, especially strawberry shortcake and it was Juneteenth last weekend, strawberry soda for Juneteenth, you know, key lime pie. That's one of my favorite summer foods. I happen to have one in my freezer taking it to my friend's house tomorrow for dinner. All right. I think I will close the chat. Thank you so much everybody for sharing and I'm going to move us on to the next slide. Now we're going to talk about similes. The simile is one of those tools of the trade, something we can use to make our writing a little bit more interesting. There was a simile on this page of my book. There is joy inside of me, a happiness deep down inside of me that glows bright and warm as the sun and shines delayed on everything I see. Warm as the sun. That is a simile because a simile compares two things using like or as. So here's another example. Your smile sweet as cotton candy. You can use similes to enhance your writing. Make it a little bit fancier. Fill in the blanks for the following words. They're on the next slide and try adding a simile to your next poem. Once you get used to seeing similarities between things, seeing how things are the same, it won't be too hard to develop metaphors for your writing as well. A metaphor is another tool of the trade. You can put in your toolbox and carry around with you. All right. So I am going to open up the chat again, I think. Here we go. And I'm going to ask folks to give me words to finish sweet as. Give me some things that are sweet. We have sweet as cotton candy, sweet as since I'm Canadian, I'll throw maple syrup, sweet as puppies. Nice. Sweet as a chocolate bar. Thank you, Orianna. Sweet as hot cocoa. Yes. Yes. Or cold cocoa. Any kind of chocolate. Sweet as honey. Sweet as cinnamon. Thank you, Elaine. I love cinnamon. And cinnamon actually helps manage your sugar in your body. So it's a good thing. Sweet as ice cream. Yes. I had some fun Fetty ice cream the other day. It was so good. Sweet as mama's smile. Beautiful. Sweet as a baby. Very nice. All right. Sweet as laughter and marshmallows. Yes. Marshmallows melted over chocolate in a s'more. Sweet as summer. Beautiful. How about hot? Sweet as love and jelly. Thank you. How about hot, folks? Hot like. Think about something that's hot to touch. Think about something that's hot to taste. Hot like melting pot. Good. Hot like boiling water. Good. Oh, a beach bonfire. I just wrote that into my story. Hot like hot sauce. Absolutely. Sriracha. Hot like tea. Hot like, fireflies. Hot like a volcano. Very good. Hot like jalapenos. Yes. Hot like lava. Hot like steam. All right. Y'all got the hang of this. How about soft, soft as puppies? Yep. Soft as silk. Nice. Soft as cream, cotton, silk. A baby's foot, Orianna. Very good. Soft as clouds. Soft as bonbons. Interesting. Pom poms, maybe. Yep. Soft as grandma's blanket. Very nice. Soft as yarn. Good. Good. Soft as a pillow. Soft as grandma's cheek. Wow. Y'all are really good at this. How about sharp? Sharp as, can you think of something that's sharp to touch? Sharp as a tack. Good. Sharp as a knife. Sharp as a needle. Yes. Sharp as nails. Scissors. Ooh, a shark's fin. Very nice. Sharp as a needle. Yep. I got my job, my vaccination last month. Sharp as a sword. Good. Good. Sharp as a razor. Uh-huh. Sharp as grandma's eyes. All right. Cut eye. Watch out for cut eye. Sharp as, the next one I think is actually kind of hard. So maybe we can move on to a porcupine. Excellent Matteo. How about gentle as, what are some things that are gentle? Gentle as a breeze. Gentle as flowers. Gentle as a stream or a rolling hill. Very nice. Gentle as the breeze. Mommy's hands. A pillow. Baby chicken. A massage. Nice. Good. Gentle as daddy's voice. Oh, I love bunnies. Gentle as the wind. Very nice. Gentle as the lake lapping against the shore. Wow. Y'all are fantastic. I think we are ready to write some poetry. All right. A gentle as a friend's voice. Very nice. All right. I think I will close the chat unless there's anything else coming in. All right. Now let's make a poem about joy. So we had a list of all the things that brought us joy. We have just learned how to do a simile. Here's a poem I wrote. Joy warms my heart like a hug from my grandma. Joy is golden like daffodils dozing in spring sunshine. Joy shines like bubbles glistening in the summer sun. Joy is clear as the voices of my people singing hymns on Sunday. Joy makes every burden easier to bear. So you know how sometimes you have a heavy burden, you're carrying something. Maybe it's actual groceries. Maybe you just feel like you're carrying a lot of stress or worry or anxiety. And then you hear somebody laughing their head off outside in the street and you look outside and see them laughing. And suddenly your burden doesn't feel as heavy. Maybe you find something to laugh at. All right. So for you to write your poem, you can just write maybe three things, three stanzas, three statements about joy. You can do what I did. I made my sentences very short. I didn't use any punctuation. This is called a free verse poem. Free verse poems have no rules. You don't have to capitalize anything if you don't want to. You don't have to use punctuation. It doesn't have to rhyme. That's why I like free verse poetry. But I'm going to give you a couple of minutes now. And I'm going to ask you to write about three things that make you happy. You can try to use a simile if you want, but you don't have to. You can just say, I feel joy when I hold my dog and his smelly breath fills my face. You can write about anything that makes you happy. Joy is having my mom's arms wrapped around me. I'm happy when I'm safe. I'm happy when I'm eating ice cream. So I'll give you a couple of minutes. And these are just drafts, right? Nobody has to write a perfect poem in two minutes. You're just writing down your ideas. And if you want to go back and revise them later, you can polish your poem. But for now, we're just just writing whatever we feel in our hearts. Things that make you happy. After I've given folks a little bit of time to write, then I'll see if we have some volunteers who want to share their poem. Pauline already has something. Joy is a baby's giggles, like a blanket of warm breath that keeps coming back. I love it. You know, if you've ever gone to a poetry reading at a club, we don't clap, we snap. It's how we show appreciation. So if you send me a poem and I read it and it's wonderful, I'm going to snap for you. Joy is a picnic with a good friend. Absolutely. So you've got good food and companionship and conversation. All of those things together make you happy. Joy is when my friends make me laugh. Very nice, Eleanor. And you know, once you make one statement, you can just add another statement and then another statement. And then you've got a poem. Joy is cool ice cream on a warm beach. Yes. Joy is coming home after being away for a long time. And the door is still open. Very nice, Pauline. Ah, that open door lets you know you're always welcome. I wonder if anybody has a color for joy. I said joy is golden like daffodils. Joy is like waterfalls making a song in the river. Mateo, that's beautiful. A song in the river. Wow. Does joy last forever? Because if joy is like a bubble, you've got that moment where it's glistening in the sun and then it's gone. But then you can make another bubble. Joy is like the sunset, one color, hugging the next. Wow, we've got some very poetic people with us today. And like I said, this is just your first draft, you know, you're getting some ideas down. You can always go back later and revise your poem. Anybody else who'd like to share? I do have one other poem activity that we could do. But I could also stop and take a few questions where we could listen to someone else's poem. I'm easy. Morgan, do you want to chime in with an opinion? Do you think I should do another poem? Joy is pizza. Hi everybody. Zeta, that was amazing. I'm snapping. That's great. Well, let's hear from our audience. Let's see, there's a question from YouTube. Do you want to answer some questions right now? Or we can kind of do a little bit of everything. How's that sound? That sounds good. What is Zeta's favorite poem? So Zeta has gets nervous when people use the F word favorite because I never have one thing that I love more than anything else except purple. That's my favorite color. But I do have a poem on my wall right above my desk. And it's by Lucille Clifton. And it's, won't you celebrate with me? And you can find that poem online if you just Google that. I wish I could, I wish I hadn't memorized, I could recite it for you, but I don't. But the last line of that poem is, won't you celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed. So it's all about survival and looking for a role model. And if you don't see one, then being your own role model. And you know, she talks about us made from being made of star shine and clay. I love that poem. But I just love so many poems. It's hard to say I subscribe to poem a day. So every morning I wake up and I have a poem in my, in my inbox from the Academy of American poets. So I like to read poems that way. And then I read books of poems sometimes. Yeah, so I have certain poems that I really love a poem. Won't you celebrate with me by Lucille Clifton I put in, say her name, I have some of my favorite poems, my mentor texts in that book. And then I talk about how I got inspiration from those poems and wrote my own poems. So there's a lot of star shining clay mentioned in my, in my own poetry because of Lucille Clifton. And I can see Pauline likes Lucille too. Yeah, she's, she was amazing. Do you like writing in any particular form? I love haiku. Haiku is a Japanese form of poetry. It's got three lines and you have to count your syllables five on the first line, seven on the second line, five on the third line. I could write a dozen haiku a day and never run out of things to write about. And I like that it's a real quick snapshot of emotion or an impression or of what you're seeing. You know, in say her name, I tried, I really tried to write different kinds of poems like a sonnet and a villanelle and a rondo and, and I find that when I'm trying to cram my ideas into a certain form, sometimes it feels restrictive. So free verse is probably my favorite form just because it's always there. And it's like that door that's always open and you don't have to, you just don't have to fit your thoughts into anyone else's box. And I think that is useful for me when, especially if I'm really upset or frustrated, you know, we've had so many police shootings and sometimes I just like, I can't even make a whole sentence, but I could definitely, you know, make a poem. Oh, Oriana's got a challenge. Can you do a haiku right now? I can definitely do a haiku right now, except I after telling people to have a pen and pencil, I don't have one. But let's see. So I wrote a haiku last week because I was doing a haiku workshop with some educators and I wanted to write about sisters, sisters. And I think my first line was, you are my witness. That's five syllables with me from the beginning with me from the beginning, because that's seven syllables. And then my last line was ally from, so that's five, seven, five. So right now, if we wanted to write a haiku about the summertime, then we might say, ice cream makes me glad. Ice cream makes me smile. Creamy, soft, and frozen. That's seven, right? A creamy frozen dessert. Summer, signature, summer. So that's five, seven, five. Ice cream, ice cream makes me smile. I'm using my fingers. I'm tapping it out on the table. A creamy frozen dessert, the taste of summer. We could just keep going. I could write about birds. We could write about love. You could write about the rain. You could write about anything. Did Matteo have a question? Did I miss that? Matteo, maybe you have your hand up and I can't see you. Are you able to type it into the chat? You don't have a question. Okay, okay. Zetta, I have a question for you. Sure. This is Morgan. Hi. If you could offer your young self, I hate to say advice, but the meaning of life or the key, the secret to life, if you could offer your young self one great suggestion, what would it be? Oh, I know that one easily. I would tell my young self, you are enough. I spent a lot of my life easily 20, 20, maybe 30 years trying to please other people and trying to be more like the people that I thought were successful. And I didn't think that I was enough. I thought I had to sound like someone else or just like someone else or write like someone else when I finally started reading Black women writers like Alice Walker and Tony Morse. And then I wanted to sound like them, but I couldn't sound like them because I wasn't them. And it took me so long to realize that I had my own unique, distinct, beautiful voice. And if I sang in that voice, if I wrote in that voice, then I would join the chorus of all these other distinct, unique voices, and we sound good together. You don't have to sound like anybody else. In fact, if you do sound like anybody else, no one will know it's you, right? So it's better to just be yourself and accept yourself. Yeah, I wish it hadn't, I'm almost 50 now. So I wish it hadn't taken me that long to realize that I have my own experiences and my own voice. And I can write about the things that I've lived through. I don't have to, you know, like when I started writing magical stories, I write about dragons and unicorns and stuff. And I had only read about white kids in England. And I thought I had to write about white kids in England. Like that's what you had to do to write magical stories, which is not true, because magic is for everyone. And it can happen anywhere. And so now I always just write about my neighborhood. There's so many amazing things in everybody's neighborhood. You know, there's the potential for magic there. So yeah, I wish I had said to myself, you are enough. Do you listen to music when you write? Yes, I do. I am not that tech savvy. And it took me a very long time to understand Pandora. But now that I do, I have a Pandora channel. Emily Sunday is the name of the station. And I really like her. But I listened to Leon Lajavez and Beyonce and Sia and Coldplay. Oh my goodness. I don't know how they shuffle and come up with recommendations for me, but I just, I do, I listen to music a lot. For a while, I was writing with the TV on. And I found that that was, it forced me to block out the TV and focus on my writing more. But now I don't do that. And now I don't have cable. So now I mostly write with music on. And it does, it definitely helps a lot, a lot. What's your favorite music artist? I don't have one, but I like all of those people that I just mentioned. I'm probably leaving out somebody I really like, Alice Smith, I think is pretty amazing. Oh my goodness. I was watching the show last week for Juneteenth. It was all about Blackjoy and Esperanza Spalding, who is a bassist. She plays the upright bass. She had just written a new song with her co-writer. And I have played that about 100 times. I just keep rewinding it. It's on YouTube. I keep rewinding it and playing it. It's a really beautiful song. I just heard Amethyst Kaya, I think is her name on NPR the other day. And now I've added her to my Pandora channel. So now I'm listening to her too. She plays bluegrass. So yeah, I like to have as much diversity in my music. I get pretty tired, Missy Elliott. I was gonna say, I don't listen to rap music, but then I listen to a fair bit of Missy Elliott, Megan Thee Stallion. Every so often, Lauren Hill, a rap song will come on and I'll be like, that's just what I needed. Yeah. But I don't listen to much rap. Yeah. Sada, thank you so much. It's been really wonderful to have you here. So thank you for inviting me. Yes. Do you have any words of farewell for our community here? Oh, I just encourage everyone to keep writing. I never thought of myself as a poet and I still don't lead with that identity. But one of the reasons I wanted to publish a book of poetry was to prove that anybody can do it. It's really, you know, poetry is for everyone. And, you know, I was introduced to poetry by reading Robert Frost and I didn't like his poetry and that might have closed the door for me for good. So I encourage everyone, if you don't like one poem, it's okay. Just be like, I didn't like that. And then move on to the next poem. And you know what? Write your own poems. If you don't find other poets and you don't like their work, just write the poems that you do like. Everybody can write poetry. It is for everyone. And you don't need a special occasion and it only takes like a piece of paper and a pencil. You can even write poems on your phone if you don't have paper or pencil near you. You know, poems and stories, sharing things together, that's what's kept us connected for this past year. So I really hope everyone understands that poetry can help you heal, not just reading poetry, but writing poetry, being creative, expressing yourself. So many of us have, I think, kept our emotions in for a long time and now is the moment really to let them out, let them live, let them breathe, honor your emotions, all of them, and know you're entitled to be angry and sad and frustrated and happy and compassionate and hopeful, all of those things. That's what makes us human. That's what makes us human. So thank you so much, Morgan, in the San Francisco Public Library Summer Strike Program for inviting me here. Today, this has been a lot of fun, perfect poetry writing day. Yay. I just saw we have, I want to just sneak in one thing. This is a quick poem that Timothy wrote and put in the chat. Happy is like Zeta, whose poetry is life joy. Thank you, poetry. Timothy. All right, everybody. Thank you for coming today. Like I said, we have tons of programs all summer long. So you can join us next week. Again, on Thursday, Mike Young, author of Boys in the Back Row, will be here on June 30th at 1pm. Thank you, Zeta. Thank you everyone for being with us today. Enjoy the sunshine.