Lessons: Learning to teach in an urban school

Year 1

Inventory all the pain, lacerations

Exposed creations, bloody eyes, swollen lips

Children who don’t deserve the lick

Hiding bruises, bumps and broken limbs

Year 2

Dream big dreams for

Children who lack any

Esteem much less self,

Beaten in homes or

Alleys, all alone,

You start to write

Basic facts:

Keisha, abandoned age one

Demetrius has never felt love

Alisha falls asleep to bullet fights

Alana's mom kills her trick one night

Year 3

You wise up

Counsel the

Ones who hurt

Burn cages of lead

And begin to teach

The parents instead

Build committees

Foundations

Take the kids to college

Mediate

Congregate

Plan and act

Distance yourself

Year 4

You’re tired of drowning

Inside of just aching

You still

Reach to cry, but

You laugh this time

You start to see all the

Lovely, unveiling

Beauty underneath marks

Of poverty

A child who gives because he’s gone without

A child who heals pages of his own doubt,

that he will live until the morning

And the one who comforts the teacher (broken),

The child knowing all the while that souls don’t swell for long

Light buried inside this blossom

I don't know how many people have
seen a child just before he is to bloom
when the ideas are wrapped so tight inside a mind
spilling over into curious smiles
and overglowing eyes

afterschool
my first grader
sat drinking his milk
people might have noticed
him watching every person thing movement
copious head notes

I told him "you'll show us someday everything
you have locked inside that head of yours,
that you're the smartest kid, right?"

and people might have been sad to see and hear
rays beamed,
big eyes bright, slight smile the boys replies

"Smart. Did you say smart?
No one's ever called me that before."

The Gifts of the Children

racing to open presents
formed in pretty packaging
overflowing table upon table
to the children who have little to wait for

in their first grade classroom
the children sit listening for their names to
take their gifts
remote control cars
Black baby dolls
Barbies
Bratz

a large company has made a generous donation

i think how
the first snowflake
before industry
must have
been so pure

like the joy of the boy
opening his box
finding inside a plain red coat
smiling exclaiming laughing "I've wanted one of these my whole life."

he tries it on for the first time as the snow piles around his newly warmed world

- - ----------------------- Blessed Body ---------------- -

Each night,

The moon sinks
Like the chattering teeth below the waters edge

Before it falls, it comes to us
Chilling our shoulders
Licking salt from this skin
Church bells barely heard, bong through the night
They weren’t supposed to be chiming this late
The lady on the pier smells the night clouds
Captain James takes notice of her for the last time
Before he leaves Christmas Eve, 1959
The heat of the water burning ships
But they remain strong enough, turn water back lukewarm
Untouched carved cooling
The rudder pacing from side to side
Using the motor when the oars wouldn’t start
Fallen sailors are sighted in the offing
The water sparkles companionship,
Stilled sea evaporates leaving drops while
The lady at the edge floats up to the moon and
Pierces it with her fiery swords and death stars
Trying to harvest new waters
As the Broken One brings her back
Ten or twenty years, this could all be pulled away leaving only thick frozen air
Que faire?
Go into that sky and bring back the eulogies
Kept inside a night where our ship eata fog
Veers towards the empty East Bells
Drowns out the beating waves speaking us to come beneath
And find what is left in this sea

The Rising Cost of Medication

Increasing folds of skin

on the hands of the man

hold a knife.

Trying to save money,

place a sturdy cut through a white tablet

like thick vines sliced in half,

through shortcuts in jungles

you never quite made your way through.

Grandpa, won’t that kill you, not taking all your pills?

You put the knife on the counter. “Nah.” Look back at me joking.

“If anything, I’ll only half- die”

The Ceremony

We were trying not to cry
when we heard
the car struck the boy
early morning
on his way to school


The students arriving talked about the body
in blood (they couldn't see whose it was)
as we rounded every child inside to keep from
leaving to investigate

One student said “someone has died.”
but he didn’t know
for sure

We got word within an hour
he was still alive

At the hospital the cords
strung straight into his head
His fourth grade teacher talked to
her child without open eyes
She said “we miss you” and “you’re strong”
And “you need to wake up.”

He never moved, resting in the first
frost

Two months go by
at the ceremony, he can walk
All the family and other teachers and children have come by
to wish him well

Behind the house in an alley, he plays shy with the other children
throws the ball into the air, waits, waits, and by
a miracle catches
the child that was left inside

Murders/ Deaths may be connected

he was the first to die
which means you were the second
walking around proposing death
other- sided

in the days after the first killing
the paper described you as hysterical

but I remember
your romantic notions
of seventh grade science
sitting next to me
peering, flirting, making me laugh
at half- witted comments
you were quite calm back then

i could have held
more of your
stories from first grade on

could have
but instead i remember the saddest
several men are being questioned
in your death

two more were killed in the revenge

My student wrote a poem

i cannot offer you
a door
today

unless this door
chained
open whispers your name

i could not
speak your words
but they were
held in the rhythm of ten year old tongue
silenced

I wanted you to speak them
but
you weren't speaking language
understandable
when you were screaming
running, crying

so instead
you write poems young children should not write
placed on my desk
unspoken dark death