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Monthly Archives: June 2011
Angel Conoesto – Poem (“Again Falling”)
Again falling, my hand opens
and the air is my salvation.
Again falling, I see the layered airs of my city
and its dirty streets, opening to the secret other
city, the home of a thousand lost children
and their grizzled fathers with work-locked
hands, again falling to the last outpost
of their aspirations, or their first occasions
of grief. Again falling, can you see
that all of it, all of
them are here?
Sam Rempell – Poem (“The Night Before the War Began”)
The night before
The war began,
We began
With nothing else.
We began as
An open hand,
Like an open book,
Beginning, for example, with
The letter A:
An arrowhead, and
The letter I: watching
The sky,
Thinking the thoughts
Of the first man alive.
Robinson Jeffers – Poem (“Be Angry at the Sun”)
That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.
Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and turn,
They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors,
This republic, Europe, Asia.
Observe them gesticulating,
Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.
You are not Catullus, you know,
To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You are far
From Dante’s feet, but even farther from his dirty
Political hatreds.
Let boys want pleasure, and men
Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped.
Yours is not theirs.
A. L. Pella – Poem (“American Garden”)
“Not here, not now” a gruff
hand insists, the brick square
public but not large, behind the shops
and the pub, dark now, a straggling
departer crossing to his car here, shadow
and there, fixed, a man hunched over
plastic bags, no where else
for now to go.
Later, he gets in our
back seat, dislocated to the wrong
donut store, this one not open all
night, or not to him, so we carry him
cross town to the other
– and if it were
colder, we might give him
enough, or barely enough
for a room though tonight
it’s warm enough for
for him to lean against the wall,
his bags under the plastic
table, just as I sleep when I fly.
How’d you wind up living like this, Frank,
we ask in the car, and he’s
honest, we have to give him
that:
Ah, I’m a terrible
drinker, he says,
I brought it all on myself. Yes,
yes, yes, he says, and
sometimes he can stay
with his sister
a few towns over,
but he
doesn’t really like her all that much,
or she, him, and really,
he says, it’s just a pleasure to
be out here,
moving through the world.
Peter Temes – The Teacher’s Vocation
I was at party recently – a fancy party. Many of the attendees were graduates of the same Ivy-League college, and they had their catching up to do. One cluster was typical – a young doctor, a lawyer and an investment banker talking with my friend, a teacher. They talked about spouses, vacations, missing old friends, and an escapade or two from their undergraduate days. Then the banker made some efforts to lure the teacher into confessing how little she was actually paid. And then she told them – literally causing the lawyer to gasp. But she displayed that happiness that wins any argument, and her old classmates felt just a little bit embarrassed in the end, just a little bit shaken to have forgotten the deep good fortune of doing what we love, and doing it well.
When I think back on that party, I think of the teachers who start every school year shutting their classroom doors and telling their students, “We are all so, so lucky to be here together,” and really meaning it.
I think of the people I know who haven’t been able to give up the social prestige of other jobs, or the higher salaries, or the sense that their parents or their siblings or their neighbors might think less of them if they became full-time teachers, and I feel even luckier myself. I never have a moment of doubt about the importance of my work, and never a moment of wishing I was reviewing contracts for a living, or building houses, or even healing the sick. My calling as a teacher keeps me deeply connected to young people whom I can help, and who help me; whom I can teach, and learn from; who surprise me every day, and allow me to be the version of myself that makes me most proud.
I think, also, of all those teachers who have no shortage of bad days, chilly colleagues, unthinking supervisors, and never enough dry-erase markers no matter how persistently they requisition or how many they buy. I think of how we can experience that terrible day, or that class that just does not work, or the student who will not recognize his own ability, and still feel that little flame of good fortune, of pride in our work, of knowing that we are doing the work we are here to do, flicker back on like a light in the darkness, or a fire on a cold night. Like most great callings, being a teacher can be difficult and at times thankless, but it remains truly a great vocation, and a great anchor for any man’s or any woman’s life.
The.American.Word. 