Activity #1: Poetry

How to do it

Your challenge for this activity is to tell your story through poetry.

Begin each line of your poem with the words "I am from..."

You can use the poem to remember places, experiences, people, sights, and sounds.

It can be short or long. It does not need to rhyme!

This activity invites you to explore memories and reconnect.

"Our lives are made out of stories, and understanding and handing on our stories strengthens us as individuals and as families."

~ George Ella Lyon

Bridging Histories' George Francis with mystic poet Talking Thekla at Rastafari Culture Centre on Grosvenor Road, 31 March 2026

Filwood poets join in Bridging Histories workshop with Tom Stockley, 26 Sept 2022 at Filwood Community Centre

When you join in this poetry activity, you're taking part in a global 'I am from' poetry movement. You can read thousands of other 'I am from' poems here.

You can take inspiration from George Ella Lyon's original 1993 poem, 'Where I'm From' which she in turn wrote inspired by Tennessee writer Jo Carson's 'Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet.' Lyon's poem goes like this:

Where I'm from

I am from clothespins,

from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.

I am from the dirt under the back porch.

(Black, glistening,

it tasted like beets.)

I am from the forsythia bush

the Dutch elm

whose long-gone limbs I remember

as if they were my own.

I'm from fudge and eyeglasses,

from Imogene and Alafair.

I'm from the know-it-alls

and the pass-it-ons,

from Perk up! and Pipe down!

I'm from He restoreth my soul

with a cottonball lamb

and ten verses I can say myself.

I'm from Artemus and Billie's Banch,

fried corn and strong coffee.

From the finger my grandfather lost

to the auger,

the eye my father shut to keep his sight.

Under my bed was a dress box

spilling old pictures,

a sift of lost faces

to drift beneath my dreams.

I am from those moments -

snapped before they budded -

leaf-fall from the family tree.