I have been looking forward to today all week long!
Today’s poem is quite possibly my favorite poem of all time. It’s called, “This Beach” by Oscar Brown, Jr. I suggest you watch it twice. The first time I watched it, I thought Mr. Brown was talking about the Battle of Normandy, but I came to realize that’s not so.
When I present a spoken word performance to students, I always introduce it with a a few questions related to the content of the poem. Usually, these questions are a way to get the students to think about the topic and start to invest themselves in it. Students are more likely to understand content when they understand that it is relevant to them. Here are my questions for this poem:
1. What do you know about the Battle of Normandy?
2. Oscar Brown, Jr. uses the the beach as an extended metaphor for death in “This Beach.” What event or object could you compare your life to?
3. How do young people’s thoughts about death differ from older people’s thoughts about death? How are they similar?
Here’s the poem. Enjoy!
