poems about voices of modern culture

As you read Teresa Paloma Acosta's "My Mother Pieced Quilts" and George Ella Lyon's "Where I'm From," learn this word list. These word lists support the reading of the following texts from SpringBoard English Textual Power, Level 5, Unit 1 "Voices of Modern Culture": poems, more poems, Funny in Farsi, monologues by Debbie Lamedman
25 words 10 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. canvas
    a heavy, closely woven fabric
    but it was just that every morning I awoke to these
    october ripened canvases
  2. face
    a surface forming part of the outside of an object
    passed my hand across their cloth faces
  3. communion
    sharing thoughts and feelings
    these strips of gentle communion cotton and flannel
  4. oblong
    deviating from a shape by being elongated in one direction
    how you shaped patterns square and oblong and round
  5. fray
    wear away by rubbing
    how the thread darted in and out
    galloping along the frayed edges
  6. drawing board
    a smooth board on which paper is placed for making drawings
    in the evening you sat at your canvas
    --our cracked linoleum floor the drawing board
  7. lounge
    sit or recline comfortably
    me lounging on your arm
    and you staking out the plan
  8. Corpus Christi
    Thursday after Trinity Sunday; first celebrated in 1246
    whether to mix a yellow with blue and white and paint the
    corpus christi noon when my father held your hand
  9. somber
    serious and gloomy in character
    whether to shape a five-point star from the
    somber black silk you wore to grandmother's funeral
  10. current
    a steady flow of a fluid or gas
    you were the river current
    carrying the roaring notes...
  11. caravan
    a procession traveling together in single file
    you were the caravan master at the reins
  12. mosaic
    design made of small pieces of colored stone or glass
    driving your thread needle artillery across the mosaic cloth bridges
  13. testimony
    something that serves as evidence
    delivering yourself in separate testimonies
  14. taut
    pulled or drawn tight
    sewn hard and taut to withstand the thrashings of twenty-five years
  15. quilt
    bedding made of layers stuffed and stitched together
    knotted with love
    the quilts sing on
  16. carbon tetrachloride
    a colorless nonflammable liquid used as a solvent for fats and oils; because of its toxicity its use as a cleaning fluid or fire extinguisher has declined
    I am from clothes-pins
    from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride
  17. glisten
    be shiny, as if wet
    (Black, glistening,
    it tasted like beets.)
  18. forsythia
    any of various early blooming oleaceous shrubs of the genus Forsythia; native to eastern Asia and southern Europe but widely cultivated for their branches of bright yellow bell-shaped flowers
    I am from the forsythia bush
  19. Dutch elm
    any of various hybrid ornamental European shade trees ranging from dwarf to tall
    the Dutch Elm
    whose long gone limbs I remember
    as if they were my own.
  20. perk
    gain or regain energy
    from Perk up! and Pipe down!
  21. restore
    return to life; get or give new life or energy
    I'm from He restoreth my soul
  22. verse
    literature in metrical form
    with a cottonball lamb
    and ten verses I can say myself.
  23. auger
    a hand tool used to bore holes
    From the finger my grandfather lost
    to the auger.
  24. sift
    move as if through a sieve
    Under my bed was a dress box
    spilling old pictures,
    a sift of lost faces
  25. bud
    start to grow or develop
    I am from those moments--
    snapped before I budded--
    leaf-fall from the family tree.
Created on Wed Jul 30 13:56:13 EDT 2014 (updated Thu Jul 31 07:27:08 EDT 2014)

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