59 School poems

So I went to school not feeling a fool and guess what I came back home knowing how much I didn't know so I started studying and learning and having fun with the knowledge and now I'm a happy adult who doesn't know much but at least I tried and guess what I do know who I am

The math has changed i can't help with the math anymore they do it differently now i sit with her anyway i hand her things i make snacks i'm still useful, just differently

it's your 1st year of college & you should be missing home by now but mostly you don't. you read the Chicago newspapers & call family on Sundays. you pick up going to church at a place adjacent to the projects. you're not from the projects & the ones in Chicago seem worse but there's comfort in being around plainspoken folk. the church folk feed you & also cook you food. you take African American studies classes & sleep through Spanish & write poems at night. you read the newspaper. you consider pledging a fraternity. you go to parties to watch people. you don't miss home. you call your ex girl a lot. you imagine her face across the phone line. you stare at the scar on her chin. it is shiny & smooth. you read the newspaper. you text new girls mostly. you invite them to play cards & bet clothes or take them to dinner on your birthday so you don't spend it alone or you share their extra-long twin beds or you just text them. it's your 1st year of college & your nephew is tiny & your niece is young enough to be happy & the world is new & you are not going home for Thanksgiving. you are in the South at a new friend's house. you go to church with his family & to his old high school's basketball game & to his malls & to his grandmother's house. you did not make your team past 9th grade & never went to malls much. your grandmother had been dead for 2 years now. you read the newspaper. his family are nice people. you do not miss home. you go back to school. you stop talking to your ex girl. she has a new guy. you do not miss home. you write poems. you read the newspaper. there are still more kids dying. your 1st year of college & you should be missing but you're still here. you write papers about black people & voting & violence & families & that is the same paper. you don't read the newspaper. you have finals to finish. you go to church on Sunday with your new friend & you talk to new girls & consider pledging. you have heard the fraternities will haze you. you have heard about beating but you are not from the projects & you are not in Chicago. you stop reading the newspaper. you decide to kiss a girl & mean it. you decide to pledge a fraternity. you should have more information about the newspaper. & the girl. & the fraternity. you should call home more. you don't read the newspapers or call. you are not from the projects or Chicago. you do not miss home. or your ex girl. or your newspaper. there are still more kids dying. you convince your new friend to pledge the fraternity. he worries about the hazing, the beatings. you tell him this is an opportunity. don't miss it.

He reminds me of someone I used to know, but who? Before class, he comes to my office to shmooze, a thousand thousand pointless interesting speculations. Irrepressible boy, his assignments are rarely completed, or actually started. This week, instead of research in the stacks, he’s performing with a reggae band that didn’t exist last week. Kids danced to his music and stripped, he tells me gleefully, high spirit of the street festival. He’s the singer, of course— why ask if he studied an instrument? On the brink of graduating with an engineering degree (not, it turned out, his forte), he switched to English, his second language. It’s hard to swallow the bravura of his academic escapes or tell if the dark eyes laugh with his face. Once, he brought me a tiny persimmon he’d picked on campus; once, a poem about an elderly friend in New Delhi who left him volumes of Tagore and memories of avuncular conversation. My encouragement makes him skittish— it doesn’t suit his jubilant histrionics of despair. And I remember myself shrinking from enthusiasm or praise, the prospect of effort-drudgery. Success—a threat. A future, we figure, of revision—yet what can the future be but revision and repair? Now, on the brink again, graduation’s postponed, the brilliant thesis on Walker Percy unwritten. “I’ll drive to New Orleans and soak it up and write my paper in a weekend,” he announces in the Honors office. And, “I want to be a bum in daytime and a reggae star at night!” What could I give him from my life or art that matters, how share the desperate slumber of my early years, the flashes of inspiration and passion in a life on hold? If I didn’t fool myself or anyone, no one could touch me, or tell me much . . . This gloomy Houston Monday, he appears at my door, so sunny I wouldn’t dare to wake him now, or say it matters if he wakes at all. “Write a poem about me!” he commands, and so I do.

If I told you Earl, the toughest kid on my block in North Philadelphia, bow-legged and ominous, could beat any man or woman in ten moves playing white, or that he traveled to Yugoslavia to frustrate the bearded masters at the Belgrade Chess Association, you'd think I was given to hyperbole, and if, at dinnertime, I took you into the faint light of his Section 8 home reeking of onions, liver, and gravy, his six little brothers fighting on a broken love-seat for room in front of a cracked flat-screen, one whose diaper sags it's a wonder it hasn't fallen to his ankles, the walls behind doors exposing the sheetrock the perfect O of a handle, and the slats of stairs missing where Baby-boy gets stuck trying to ascend to a dominion foreign to you and me with its loud timbales and drums blasting down from the closed room of his cousin whose mother stands on a corner on the other side of town all times of day and night, except when her relief check arrives at the beginning of the month, you'd get a better picture of Earl's ferocity after-school on the board in Mr. Sherman's class, but not necessarily when he stands near you at a downtown bus-stop in a jacket a size too small, hunching his shoulders around his ears, as you imagine the checkered squares of his poverty and anger, and pray he does not turn his precise gaze too long in your direction for fear he blames you and proceeds to take your Queen.

The only relics left are those long spangled seconds our school clock chipped out when you crossed the social hall and we found each other alive, by our glances never to accept our town's ways, torture for advancement, nor ever again be prisoners by choice. Now I learn you died serving among the natives of Garden City, Kansas, part of a Peace Corps before governments thought of it. Ruth, over the horizon your friends eat foreign chaff and have addresses like titles, but for you the crows and hawks patrol the old river. May they never forsake you, nor you need monuments other than this I make, and the one I hear clocks chip in that world we found.

They were smooth ovals, and some the shade of potatoes— some had been moth-eaten or spotted, the maples were starched, and crackled like campfire. We put them under tracing paper and rubbed our crayons over them, X-raying the spread of their bones and black, veined catacombs. We colored them green and brown and orange, and cut them out along the edges, labeling them deciduous or evergreen. All day, in the stuffy air of the classroom, with its cockeyed globe, and nautical maps of ocean floors, I watched those leaves lost in their own worlds flap on the pins of the bulletin boards: without branches or roots, or even a sky to hold on to.

Up the reputable walks of old established trees They stalk, children of the nouveaux riches; chimes Of the tall Clock Tower drench their heads in blessing: “I don't wanna play at your house; I don't like you any more.” My house stands opposite, on the other hill, Among meadows, with the orchard fences down and falling; Deer come almost to the door. You cannot see it, even in this clearest morning. White birds hang in the air between Over the garbage landfill and those homes thereto adjacent, Hovering slowly, turning, settling down Like the flakes sifting imperceptibly onto the little town In a waterball of glass. And yet, this morning, beyond this quiet scene, The floating birds, the backyards of the poor, Beyond the shopping plaza, the dead canal, the hillside lying tilted in the air, Tomorrow has broken out today: Riot in Algeria, in Cyprus, in Alabama; Aged in wrong, the empires are declining, And China gathers, soundlessly, like evidence. What shall I say to the young on such a morning?— Mind is the one salvation?—also grammar?— No; my little ones lean not toward revolt. They Are the Whites, the vaguely furiously driven, who resist Their souls with such passivity As would make Quakers swear. All day, dear Lord, all day They wear their godhead lightly. They look out from their hill and say, To themselves, “We have nowhere to go but down; The great destination is to stay.” Surely the nations will be reasonable; They look at the world—don't they?—the world's way? The clock just now has nothing more to say.

How untouchable the girls arm-locked strutting up the main hall of Central High unopposed for decades looked. I flattened myself against the wall, unnerved by their cloudsea of élan, which pounced upon any timid girl regrettably in their way, their high-wattage lifting slow motion like curls of light strands of honey. The swagger behind their blue-tinted sunglasses and low-rider jeans hurt boys like me, so vast the worlds between us, even the slightest whiff of recognition, an accidental side glance, an unintended tongue-piercing display of Juicy Fruit chew, was intoxicating and could wildly cast a chess-playing geek into a week-long surmise of inner doubts, likelihoods, and depressions. You might say my whole life led to celebrating youth and how it snubs and rebuffs. Back then I learned to avoid what I feared and to place my third-string hopes on a game-winning basketball shot, sure it would slow them to a stop, pan their lip-glossed smiles, blessing me with their cool.

The others bent their heads and started in. Confused, I asked my neighbor to explain—a sturdy, bright-cheeked girl who brought raw milk to school from her family’s herd of Holsteins. Ann had a blue bookmark, and on it Christ revealed his beating heart, holding the flesh back with His wounded hand. Ann understood division. . . . Miss Moran sprang from her monumental desk and led me roughly through the class without a word. My shame was radical as she propelled me past the cloakroom to the furnace closet, where only the boys were put, only the older ones at that. The door swung briskly shut. The warmth, the gloom, the smell of sweeping compound clinging to the broom soothed me. I found a bucket, turned it upside down, and sat, hugging my knees. I hummed a theme from Haydn that I knew from my piano lessons. . . . and hardened my heart against authority. And then I heard her steps, her fingers on the latch. She led me, blinking and changed, back to the class.