A high school English teacher used her weekly Impromptu Poetry session to find out what 11th graders thought veterans had accomplished. The teacher developed a writing prompt that asked the students to describe a family member who had served in the military and to show what they understood about that person. Students who did not have a family member who served in the military were asked to write about how they felt about the military, for example, or war. The students then discussed the similarities and differences in the poems and grouped the poems into categories. Students recopied their poems on small squares of paper and arranged these in the form of a wreath on the bulletin board, edged with flowers from a catalogue and with photos of some of the veterans in the center. Parents waited by this board for parent-teacher conferences and expressed how interested and moved they were by these poetic histories. (Contains eight student poems and the teacher's sample poem.) (RS)