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| Schoolmaster | |
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| School Master They hunger Those who sift through empty cans Found in empty places. They fear hunger. Those who stand atop the sifters. Who feed on the abundance of accessibility. Those who wait for a turn, To turn the page, To read, to write; They are silenced. For nourishment takes precedence Over the solitary spoken word. As books stacked, the bottom most one needs to be stilled, even stifled, So as to keep any structure from tumbling over. Heidi Baitz, Parlin, NJ teacher, teacher should have been a preacher talking, talking balking, gawking, when we don’t know Your answer force-fed Your favorite subject charging through Your cherished notes onward, onward ever onward as if You were a Bengal Lancer we all sit quietly pencils in hand each #2 at the ready Your test before us Your last command “get ready, get set, go go go” moments later marks and erasures cover the paper land salivating without a break finding each and every mistake, how smug Your smile how cyclical Your wit as Your red pen slashes in a furious fit teacher, teacher have You always been this way? or is it only since You’ve had us, as Your prey Author Unknown, (Half Drunk Muse) |
Schoolmaster
The teacher's pet knows no regret when stepping into the shoes of the
woman he adored. And as the juggling with young lives turned on him it
seems, as a teacher now, he too learned of how the young can dream.
The answer to his quest he can't guess, he's not a Don Quixote , a
knight so bright it seems , otherwise he'd ride a horse and tilt
windmills in the sky, or chase rainbows in do- and-daring-die. But he,
once young, faced the mystery of the world when no answer came his way.
“Why Mister, pretty Miss does China stay this way? What did Columbus
do before he went to school? Was he once just like us? We, young things,
empty head,but pleasant to you, us poor fools.”
The schoolmaster faced questions and dozens, dozens more . That's why he
became a schoolteacher in case he reduced the score. But the Total of
things dragged forward from his childhood numbered that plus one. As a
schoolteacher it developed into a billion and a half plus one.
It also kept him up at night and made his smoke a pipe, to search
through countless book to find that bit of strife. But the conflict of
those Halcyon days seemed to tumbled through his head, like tinkling
notes of a solo mandolin. He heard it even still when he went to bed.
So he read more books, then another few but word of mouth passed to him
made it clear that no other schoolmaster knew. They knew true blue the
physics of tall ships, the history of war with all it little quips and
every schoolteacher wondered when only still a child:'Did the Spartan
children also dream?Or of that were they denied?”
-Cleveland W. Gibson, (Author of Billabongo) Faringdon, Oxon, United Kingdom
