As an educator, I’m always looking for ways to invite young writers into writing their own poems. 

Take an interior thought, feeling, curiosity, question, concern—and a word from recent headlines and put them together. In the case of “Tsunami of Grief”—my intense daily grief over the catastrophic Gaza genocide coupled together with the word “tsunami” from headlines (someone somewhere was anticipating one after an earthquake) . . . and the poem was born. It didn’t want to be any longer. This said it all.