Tag Archives: poetry

Poem Triad

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I’m giving you three poems again, because three things laid next to each other are so often more than the sum of their parts. Poems are things that talk to each other, if we allow them to be neighbors. Here’s a favorite Christina Rossetti poem, called “In Progress,” followed by a piece of mine, and a passage from Isaiah 54 that I’ve been reading and re-reading recently.

Ten years ago it seemed impossible
That she should ever grow so calm as this,
With self-remembrance in her warmest kiss
And dim dried eyes like an exhausted well.
Slow-speaking when she had some fact to tell,
Silent with long-unbroken silences,
Centred in self yet not unpleased to please,
Gravely monotonous like a passing bell.
Mindful of drudging daily common things,
Patient at pastime, patient at her work,
Wearied perhaps but strenuous certainly.
Sometimes I fancy we may one day see
Her head shoot forth seven stars from where they lurk
And her eyes lightnings and her shoulders wings.

What makes a thing profound?
Is it Mariana Trench depth? 
A wail of grief pitched perfectly bereft? 
The complexity of kaleidoscope stained-glass 
shot through with new year’s dawn?
Great clouds of witness all making
the same pronouncement in angelic chorus?

Or is it just
a certain sharpness—
some sliver of knowing whittled so fine
that it slices into heart-skin like butter?
Perhaps profound is a needle meant only
to pierce the chest
of one woman
alone on a back deck,
a cigarette hanging between her fingers,
her t-shirt worn soft.

There is sky above her.
She sees it.

“Sing, barren woman,
    you who never bore a child;
burst into song, shout for joy,
    you who were never in labor;
because more are the children of the desolate woman
    than of her who has a husband,”
says the Lord.
“Enlarge the place of your tent,
    stretch your tent curtains wide,
    do not hold back;
lengthen your cords,
    strengthen your stakes.
For you will spread out to the right and to the left;
    your descendants will dispossess nations
    and settle in their desolate cities.”

“Do not be afraid; you will not be put to shame.
    Do not fear disgrace; you will not be humiliated.
You will forget the shame of your youth
    and remember no more the reproach of your widowhood.
For your Maker is your husband—
    the Lord Almighty is his name—
the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer;
    he is called the God of all the earth.
The Lord will call you back
    as if you were a wife deserted and distressed in spirit—
a wife who married young,
    only to be rejected,” says your God.
“For a brief moment I abandoned you,
    but with deep compassion I will bring you back.
In a surge of anger
    I hid my face from you for a moment,
but with everlasting kindness
    I will have compassion on you,”
    says the Lord your Redeemer.

Journey in Poetry

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Back in October, I gave you a little collection of poems that were perhaps talking to one another, and I’m doing the same today, just to remind both myself and you that though it is the end of February, we can remain confident that we will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. All our running in circles will not bring us either farther from or closer to him. If we are in him, he is with us. So here’s Walt Whitman (who did not know any of that), a draft-poem of mine called “The New Lazarus” which feels perpetually unfinished, and the middle passage of Psalm 139, which has been stuck pleasantly in my throat lately.

From Whitman:

Facing west from California’s shores,
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;
For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,
From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,
Long having wander’d since, round the earth having wander’d,
Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous,
(But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)

“The New Lazarus”:

Come along out! I want you out in the light.
You think it’s you alone, but we are many,
We mothers of our own exile,
Our teeming selves, but worse,
Imprisoning lightning behind our breast-bones, 
In our wrist joints, at the base of our skulls
Where it sears us, marks us.

Show me those well-documented failures.
Come out in your grave clothes,
Your skin pale in brazen light,
Show me the hilly scar,
The busted ear, the lips chewed to silence,
The huddled back, the head so wrapped in refuse
It thinks you can’t be made new.

Now, tell him, go ahead and tell him,
Tell the good doctor:
“Lord, the one you love is sick.”

Psalm 139:7-12:

Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
If I ascend into heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there Your hand shall lead me,
And Your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall fall on me,”
Even the night shall be light about me;
Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You,
But the night shines as the day;
The darkness and the light are both alike to You.

Poetry for the Meantime

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Alright, friends (this is the phrase with which I begin many of my classes nowadays) — this blog feels like a bit of a limbo space to me nowadays, so while I figure out what to do with it, I’m going to give you three poems: one from Emily Dickinson, one I scraped out during a Lenten exercise a few month ago, and then Psalm 19 from King David. I’ll just leave them here to be in conversation with each other for the moment.

From Dickinson:

The Brain — is wider than the Sky —
For — put them side by side —
The one the other will contain
With ease — and You — beside —

The Brain is deeper than the sea —
For — hold them — Blue to Blue —
The one the other will absorb —
As Sponges — Buckets — do —

The Brain is just the weight of God —
For — Heft them — Pound for Pound —
And they will differ — if they do —
As Syllable from Sound —

From myself:

Emily claims the brain outstrips the sky
but these days the firmament looks large to me:
      Fields of cloud tuft—falling sediment—
      A pocked and glowing moon—
      Satellites laced with human noise—
      And beyond wheeling stars and crowned planets:
      Vast darknesses that lead to light—
      Powers-that-be waging broad-chested wars—
      Blood streaming cross universes, tie-dyeing heaven—
      The hand that holds it all—
By compare,
my own self within 
is small, mute.

And from scripture:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
    night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun.
It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
    like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
It rises at one end of the heavens
    and makes its circuit to the other;
    nothing is deprived of its warmth.

The law of the Lord is perfect,
    refreshing the soul.
The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy,
    making wise the simple.
The precepts of the Lord are right,
    giving joy to the heart.
The commands of the Lord are radiant,
    giving light to the eyes.
The fear of the Lord is pure,
    enduring forever.
The decrees of the Lord are firm,
    and all of them are righteous.

They are more precious than gold,
    than much pure gold;
they are sweeter than honey,
    than honey from the honeycomb.
By them your servant is warned;
    in keeping them there is great reward.
But who can discern their own errors?
    Forgive my hidden faults.
Keep your servant also from willful sins;
    may they not rule over me.
Then I will be blameless,
    innocent of great transgression.

May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart
    be pleasing in your sight,
    Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.

Waiting in the Wings

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I have more than one piece waiting in the wings to be written. There is a short essay for a church program—I know that will happen and it will make its way on stage, but the others are slower and less certain. There’s the piece I started a few months ago about my absurd adventure on Amtrak this summer. I planned to submit it for a competition, but the due date cheerfully came and went while the essay remained only a couple dense pages of notes on my google drive. And then, of course, there’s the friendship book which I intended to draft so much of this summer. But I’ve found unraveling my own thousand and one thin, tangled anecdotes and weaving them into a telling is both hard and solitary. It gleams bright with difficulty from every angle.

But why writing has been difficult is not the point. The point is, it has been. Writing has been difficult for the last couple years in a way I hadn’t known before now. The front of my classroom is now a much easier space for me to inhabit than an invitingly blank page. If you had told me at twenty-three that I would be saying that, I’d have laughed in your face, but here we are.

I’ve taken to picturing my writing mind, my writing self, as a barren field which used to yield all sorts of things and now, simply, does not. Some days I tell myself that my mind is lying fallow, resting itself in the shade, leaking out all its contaminants, gorging itself on water and light, readying for some full-bursting harvest in a few seasons’ time. But on other days, winter days, I really begin to suspect it has been abandoned, that the soil in which good things once readily took root is eroding over time and time and time, in the cold, careless wind.

But it has occurred to me that I have the power to choose between these two options. I can choose to care for my words in their dormancy or I can choose to desert them. And of course I want the former. Of course I want light and life to spring from the dim stillness of rested soil. I hope my persistent writing of these words proves as much both to you and to myself.

And even before my realization of that decision, I think the fallowing had begun. Because writing has felt far from me, I don’t really have the words to explain, but there is some kind of softening happening inside me. “Peace has come with work to do.” A couple weeks ago I was reading an old book from childhood aloud to my sister—the chapter in which Mona Melendy gets a haircut and manicure then comes home and cries about it because she wishes that she hadn’t and growing up is so hard—and I almost got choked up myself because I felt for her—with her—so deeply. This stilling of the sentences running through my head and my fingers has perhaps led to a second adolescence, far different from my first. It seems to consist mainly of a kind of humility I have not before tasted.

Earlier this week a freshman girl came to my room after school to ask hard and good questions about God and truth and other things of that sort, and though I couldn’t answer all of them, I did what I could. I gave her a couple books to borrow. I gave her my friends.

In that same spirit, I’ve opened one of the packets of poetry I recently compiled to teach from, and looked to the words of even more of my friends. As my quiet ground waits for its coming season of good green things, I will allow those friends to tell me the story of things to come.

God lives
on the other side of that mirror,
but through the slit where the barrier doesn’t
quite touch ground, manages still
to squeeze in – as filtered light,
splinters of fire, a strain of music heard
then lost, then heard again.
—Denise Levertov

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
‘s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies
Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.
—G. M. Hopkins

maybe the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn’t move, maybe
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.
—Mary Oliver

Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.
—R.S. Thomas

Nay, peace, I shall behold, before the night,
The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,
The wounded hands, the weary human face.
—Oscar Wilde

Then—- O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune—-
See, see where Christ’s blood streames in the firmament:
—Edith Sitwell quoting Christopher Marlowe

If ye have any thing to send or write,
I have no bag, but here is room:
Unto my Fathers hands and sight,
(Believe me) it shall safely come.
That I shall mind, what you impart,
Look, you may put it very near my heart.
—George Herbert

and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
the darkness perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire, and flowers,
the overpowering night, the universe.
—Pablo Neruda


So, having read all, having done all, in the shadow of your wings, I will sing for joy.

A Fall Teaching Entry

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Here’s a thing I’d forgotten about my job before I came back to it. As much as I aspire to be (and usually am) in control of my classroom, hiding in its corners and quiet moments are delights and strange kernels of time which I could never plan, could never make, can only notice if I’m looking at them in just the right slant of light. They’re the oddities, the unclassifiable outliers, the secret gifts of teaching.

For example:

-The moment when we read Blake’s “I Saw a Chapel” and my group of boys actually listened to it. I asked them what they thought, and one of them said, “It’s weird.” I smiled because he meant it and also because he was right.

-Students who come and sit on my tall, soft stool to spin idly round on it between class times, sometimes to talk to me but more often to talk to each other. Sometimes I tell them to get off, but then bite my tongue and wish I hadn’t.

-How I passed out “Dream of the Rood” in translation from the Old English and had them read it in pairs with no outside guidance then watched, touched, as they drew bright pictures of the paradox of Christ’s cross, encrusted in both blood and jewels.

-The afternoon a junior came in and as he passed my desk ran his fingers absently over a turtle candle-holder I keep there, a gift from a student my first year. That turtle is even more beloved than it once was for having come such a long way.

-The map of Huck and Jim’s journey carefully traced onto butcher paper on my back wall, with a bright orange carrot drawn next to Cairo, IL, because the artist thought Cairo looked like “carrot” which it definitely doesn’t. 

-The desire to laugh and cry and burst with pride at the absurdity of it all while listening to a roomful of fourteen-year-olds stumbling in unison through the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, the droghte of March hathe perced to the roote…”

-Two boys who spent their mid-morning break in my room with heads down on the desks, covered by sweatshirt hoods, sleeping slumped right up against each other’s shoulders.

The thing is, the end of the first quarter has come, and with it, the love has hit. I hadn’t forgotten that the love for my students would come, but I’d forgotten the force with which this seemingly mild affection would barrel into my chest. This love, this concern for adolescent welfare, this enjoyment of the utter weirdness of their particular youth expands me and makes me grateful for things well outside its scope. I am grateful this week for voice messages, for Little Free Libraries, for Peter, Paul, and Mary, for counters to sit on, for crockpots and for sidewalks. I am grateful for that which gets us from place: for conversations, for seasons, for weeks and weekends, for growth which comes step by unusual step.

A Spring Story

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Spring is here with warmth and bright greens and blues.

And this weekend I wrote a paper on Christina Rossetti. That’s pretty much all I did. I’d already spent much of my week immersed in reading and outlining, and late Friday night I sat on my bed and cried because Christina existed and I exist and in one of her favorite of her own poems Jesus says, “Come and see.” Then I told myself it was probably time for bed, but instead kept writing and messing and poking at research for another two hours. I worked and worked through Saturday and much of Sunday as the sun appeared and came rushing through my window. This morning I woke up and finished the last couple pages. I went to start my laundry then rushed back to read it over again and again and twice more, prodding at sentences as I went. And, though I could have read it five more times, I stopped myself and turned it in. And took a walk to London Drugs.

There has never been such a walk to London Drugs. There were tiny blossoms coming out on the trees which had already begun to float to the ground. I smiled at unsuspecting passers by, a few of whom were even emboldened by the sunshine to smile back. I saw children with muddy bare feet and old people basking in sunbeams on benches like cats. The smell of fresh manure—like spring in Pennsylvania—became the smell of flowers by the time I got to 12th.

A couple hours ago I took the compost out with my own feet bare on the warm ground. So that’s how things are here today.

The Indigestible Portions

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I’m probably about to get all kinds of poetry on you. (But please don’t go away just yet. Hear me out.)

I am tired and achy at the moment. We could blame it somewhat fairly on last night’s restless sleep, but at the core is the fact that I’ve had an anxious week and my body knows it. Some days the sky is blue and I wear sparkly shoes because I like them, but other days, though the sky is still blue, I wear sparkly shoes because I need them and much of my energy goes into managing and dismantling my fear, trying to move past it so I can function. More than ever recently, I’ve become aware of the myriad of coping strategies I’ve developed to deal with everyday anxieties.

When I was eleven I made up a trick I sometimes still use. When I felt overwhelmed I would take a piece of paper and draw and label a little cloud for each of my worries–size and darkness corresponding to the intensity of each. I found that when I did this, put them out on paper visually, there were always fewer of them than I had assumed.

In college, to get out of bed on hard days I would promise myself that I could wear an oversized flannel, that I could put no effort into my appearance and play-act as the Invisible Girl, if only I would get up and go to class.

Even this past Fall, when I first moved to Vancouver, I was still adding strategies to my arsenal. I was irrationally nervous about riding the city bus, and so for the first few days, every time I waited at a bus stop I took a picture of my feet, so that my camera roll would fill up with growing evidence that I had done this before and I could do it again.

Every one of the aforementioned strategies have worked and still work when I need them. I am oddly proud of all the little ways I’ve come up with to chant to myself, “Be brave, be brave, and be brave.” It’s quite possible you have a similar list yourself.

But.

It is Lent now. We are in a season in which we are supposed to remember our own mortality, to feel death in our bones and pray to understand what that means. So I have found myself thinking that while bravery is good and well, it is perhaps also good and well to sit and learn from my own frailty. When my hands begin to shake, as they have a couple times this week, perhaps instead of sitting on them so they will stop and no one will notice, I can look at them and remember the dust from whence they were formed. In the stillness of the weeks leading up to our celebration of Christ’s deafening acts of redemption and renewal, maybe this magnified anxiety is not a curse, but an appropriate reminder of my need.

In my Christian Imagination class a couple days ago we read Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday.” He is mournful and acutely aware of his limits, his lack of answers, his lack of any sufficient words at all. The liturgy of any traditional Ash Wednesday service is full of the same heavy truths Eliot has felt all his life, full of the angst of Prufrock’s “overwhelming question” from fifteen years earlier in his career. Yet in this first long poem after his conversion, everything is different because while Eliot sits in the void within himself, he knows the Word has come to fill it. The Gospel gives context to the weakness he has always known so intimately. And conversely, Eliot’s long fixation with human lack and the inadequacy of his own speech has fit him with ears to hear the words of Him who is greater.

So sure, those pictures of my feet back in August bear witness that I have done this before, that riding the bus is really not such a big deal, but if I am being honest, perhaps even more importantly, they bear witness to the truth that I was afraid. I was foolishly afraid of something I could not name, which never came to fruition. Those pictures chronicle how I am riddled with sin, riddled with holes, ultimately unable, despite all my little tricks, to cope with the “indigestible portions” of my human soul.

And last night I read the end of Revelation, full of lines which deserve to be shouted, which have been and will be, all about newness, over and over. He is making all things new. Those words are always true whoever and wherever you are, but it is the infirm sinner, silent and barren, who really feels their power.

Train Tickets

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One of the only books I had space to bring with me from North Carolina was Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place, and a few weeks ago, my housemate and I started reading it aloud after dinner, but very gradually because we are often busy. And more than once while reading, I’ve found a lump in my throat that I must push down and push down again.

In the second chapter, young Corrie sees death for the first time when visiting a neighbor and is terrified, most particularly that she will lose her parents like this. Her father gently asks her, When you and I go to Amsterdam–when do I give you your ticket? And she admits, Why, just before we get on the train. He wants her to know that God gives us things only when we need them. Certainly he gives fish instead of snakes and bread instead of stones, but he doesn’t stockpile the bread and fish up around us to go stale and rot. Instead he.places them fresh into our empty hands at the moment we are most hungry for them.

For the adult Corrie of most of the novel, the train tickets God gives her one by one are to deal with the horrors she will witness and experience. I am not experiencing horrors or even hardships, but learning in small ways is learning too. Moving here has been overwhelmingly full of blessing, as I knew deep-down it would be, partially because in so much newness I can’t possibly see more than a step in front of me, so I can’t possibly plan my life the way I did in Greensboro. And as I inhale sharp gulps of fresh air which I sometimes don’t know how to take into my lungs, how to begin to eke the oxygen out of, I have had to rely on those train tickets, one by one.

And this week it was George Herbert’s “Love III.” I can’t say that I found it, more that it found me:

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
 Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
 From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
 If I lacked anything.

“A guest,” I answered, “worthy to be here”:
 Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
 I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
 “Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
 Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
 “My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
 So I did sit and eat.

I’ve known this poem since I was small, from my dad’s little pocket Temple, but it hit me with great force on Wednesday night: knocked me down and lifted me up again. And I don’t think I’ll ever fully comprehend its meaning. In fact, I don’t think Herbert did, either. He, too, was only human. We only begin to understand, but we must keep beginning, over and over.

The line that I wrote on my arm to remember was one of Love’s: “And know you not who bore the blame?” But the one that kept echoing in my head all Thursday morning was the speaker’s petulantly self-flagellating excuse: “Let my shame go where it doth deserve.” Strangely, it was not repeating itself in my own voice, or even Herbert’s. They were still, small words that kept saying, gently, but authoritatively: Let your shame go where it doth deserve. And it meant something quite different than when I say something like that to myself. Instead of implying that I ought to be wrapping myself in my sin like a comforting, moldy blanket and traipsing off to Sheol because that’s where I belong, this whisper meant that I am not my shame and guilt, that I am a made, loved creature, and that Christ bore the blame, lifted the weight off my shoulders and onto his own so it could die. And I must stop clinging to it so that he can throw it far, far away, far as the east is from the west. Yes, let it go where it doth deserve…

You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. Always.

 

Have Hope

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This week I told my students news I’ve been sitting on for a little while: next year, I’m not returning to teach because I’m going to graduate school in Vancouver, a city in some other country facing out over some other ocean. Some of them were calm when I told them, and some were less-so. Two fell out of their chairs. A few announced they could no longer do the assigned work for the day because of their great grief. I laughed. But my hands shook through the first two classes I had to tell. I am sad. I’m as sure that this is the right decision as I’m sure of my own right hand, but nothing can quite assuage the child-like sorrow I feel over leaving people and places I love.

However, my moving to another place and another life is the least of these things.

My sister told me this afternoon that everything feels heavy right now. This season has been one in which I’ve learned the weight of the world, and this week that weight has been not only burdensome but loud. All the pain in my peripheral vision, the groanings of the created beings around me, are making themselves known in cacophony.

I have been thinking of the Yeats poem I love which says: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” I grieve for the things I see that are lost, many beyond repair. He’s right: the things on which we rely will be shattered, and we can’t buy back past innocence for ourselves or for those we love.

I love that poem because it is completely true, but I also love it because it is completely short-sighted. I’m not disputing the obvious brilliance of W.B. Yeats, but human bitterness often assures that our long-distance vision is effectively nil. Things lost may be beyond repair, but they are not beyond redemption and rebirth. The things we rely on will eventually crumble beneath us, so that we may land at last on the Rock, the only one who can, in fact, buy back not only our innocence, but ourselves entire, and bring us into eternity. Yeats tells the truth, but only the first page of it.

One of my fellow teachers, a kind, kind man who was my English teacher himself back in the day, told me yesterday that I needed to write a book, because I had something to say. I hesitantly agreed, and perhaps what I have to say begins with this: I am hopeful.

Once I would have told you that I am hopeful because my students are sweet and bright and growing up into good people. I would have told you that I am hopeful because my family and my friends, they love me and make me happy. I would have told you that I am hopeful because God had given me far more comforts and blessings than I deserve. I would have told you that I am hopeful because spring comes every year.

But now, though my fears are bigger, because my fears are bigger, so are my hopes. They are stronger than they once were. Now I am hopeful because no matter where my students end up, they have a God who loves them each like the hundredth sheep. Now I am hopeful because that same faithful God loves me and has given me others to pass that love on to, in sinful fits and starts. Now I am hopeful because that love is so real that God saw fit to manifest it in his own bleeding, gasping Son on a cross. Now I am hopeful because I serve a God who dreamed up spring, who has pronounced that life can spring forth from the deadest death, that Yeats’ “blood-dimmed tide” will be followed by the clearest dawn.

Lighting the Turtle

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Last night I was searching through the depths of my school google drive for something and stumbled upon a mid-year self-evaluation I had completed during my first year of teaching. The young woman who was me almost three years ago came across as sweet and hopeful. She said that she was learning to teach and slowly getting better, that her students seemed to at least be learning something, that she was grateful for the support of the teachers around her, and that she loved her students. She italicized it. She loved them.

I’ve found myself able to be actively grateful for a couple things the last week or two. The first is that God is in control and I am not. I have been holding my hands open recently because if I tried to clamp them tight around my own plans and power, there would be nothing to grasp onto but air. I am reliant on the grace of God. The second thing I am grateful for is the manner in which God has shown me this grace: I’m grateful for my students.

They haven’t been perfect in the last few weeks, but they know that. I haven’t been perfect, and I know that too. Regardless, whenever they’ve walked into my classroom over the last few days, I’ve found it easier to breathe deep. I know that their coming will distract me and cheer me. They’re unwitting bearers of perspective and sometimes even joy. Also, I love them.

This afternoon in fourth period, after I passed out a reading from Frederick Douglass, the boy who sits directly in front of my desk looked up and asked, “Miss Hodgkins, are you going to light the turtle?” On my desk is a turtle candle holder, a gift from a student right around the same time the earlier Alice wrote that self-eval. I remember him telling me cheerfully that I could use it to help calm everybody down. It’s heavy polished stone, with a brightly painted back, and just enough room in the middle of his shell to hold a small tea light. The turtle is a familiar sight to all the souls who like to wander up to my desk between classes and fiddle with its contents. It’s a presence in my classroom, so I’ve been asked to light it many times before, but I’ve always said no. (I say no a lot.)

But today I said yes. Or rather, I looked back at the asking student for a moment, and then I dug into the glass jar on my desk, and pulled out the little blue Bic lighter that lives there. (Note that the lighter mysteriously appeared in my classroom a couple months ago. It’s not originally mine.) The kids cheered softly as I lit the dusty wick. I smiled. (I smile a lot too.)

The turtle burned for the rest of the afternoon. A few of the girls announced that it was the “eternal flame.” A student in fifth period magnanimously promised to buy me a lavender scented candle. At the beginning of sixth period several boys took turns trying to blow it out from a distance, until I stood a folder around it to protect it. After the final bell rang, I walked out into the hall and almost laughed, because the boy who’d originally given me the candle, long-graduated, was standing there with a friend, home from college. I was well-satisfied. I love them.

On Slow Learning

If you have ever owned
a tortoise, you already know
how difficult paper training can be
for some pets.

Even if you get so far
as to instill in your tortoise
the value of achieving the paper
there remains one obstacle—
your tortoise’s intrinsic sloth.

Even a well-intentioned tortoise
may find himself, in his journeys
to be painfully far from the mark.

Failing, your tortoise may shy away
for weeks within his shell,
utterly ashamed, or looking up with tiny,
wet eyes might offer an honest shrug.
Forgive him.

-Scott Cairns