By Steve Henn
Some days you feel like a pointless taskmaster
haranguing a gang of disaffected devotees,
late bell to late bell. Some days you wonder
if anything coming out your own mouth
makes sense. Some days you don’t want
to be here at all. You’re eyeing the clock
as the minutes float by, the students schlump
out of the room. Tic . . . tic . . . you wander
too easily off topic, too uninspired with yourself
to maintain merely a bad mood, not nearly
a healthy negativity. Some days you ask
should I be doing something else?
Other days you slog through hours of two-paragraph
responses hoping for a spark in the thinking
to fire you up, to stoke a response. It doesn’t
always happen often but it happens not never
too. One day you get an email from a former
student praising you, the best teacher
he ever had, including college too. You’re happy that
he thinks the challenge your course presented
sent him crawling up a hill of language
to another level of skill. There’s nothing much
to say back about this. Thank him,
What else can you do? When you drank
a lot you might’ve seen a former student
at the bar who insisted on buying you a beer,
you might’ve listened to the boozy truth
of how they honest-to-god loved you.
Your dream is to be flown across the country,
around the world even, to read your poems
to honestly interested crowds of eager
listeners, but this is what you got instead:
about 25 faces per class period, hopeful,
or bored, or angry, or sad, somewhere else
in their heads or right here, right now,
turning the light of their young and, yes,
you know it to be true, their hopeful,
their eager faces toward you.
Steve Henn wrote American Male, Guilty Prayer, Indiana Noble Sad Man of the Year, and two previous collections from NYQ Books. He teaches mostly seniors and sometimes creative writing at a public high school in northern Indiana. More at therealstevehenn.com.
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