Poems about Teaching and Learning

Contributed by CTL Members in observance of National Poetry Month

April 2009

(Note: The spacing isn't exact in the ee cummings and the Pablo Neruda poems due to basic knowledge of CTL web person.)

The Bridge Builder

"An old man, going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening, cold and gray,
To a chasm, vast, and deep, and wide,
Through which was flowing a sullen tide.
The old man crossed in the twilight dim;
The sullen stream had no fears for him;
But he turned, when safe on the other side,
And built a bridge to span the tide.
"Old man," said a fellow pilgrim, near,
"You are wasting strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day;
You never again must pass this way;
You have crossed the chasm, deep and wide-
Why build you the bridge at the eventide?"
The builder lifted his old gray head:
"Good friend, in the path I have come," he said,
"There followeth after me today
A youth, whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm, that has been naught to me,
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building the bridge for him."

Will Allen Dromgoole
Contributed by Janet Robertson

Minority

I am a minority.
Although the color of my skin is the same as yours,
I am outnumbered.
Although my god is the same as yours,
I am the few and far between.
Although my tongue sounds the same as yours,
I am a minority behind the eyes.
My Hitler is not made of flesh and bone.
My autocracy is made of letters and numbers.
My foes do not burn crosses in my front yard.
My enemies burn my hopes and dreams.

My slander is not voiced with honky, nigger, spick, kyke.
My torment is voiced with retard, idiot, dumb, moron.
Without the minorities behind the eyes,
this nation would not have a father.
Without the minorities behind the eyes,
E would not equal mc2.
Without the minorities behind the eyes,
there would be no Mona Lisa.
Where is my Dr. King, where is our Malcolm X?
I am them and so are you.
We are the minorities behind the eyes.
My brothers, my sisters, I have a dream.

Dana Davis
March 2007
Visions, DSPS Student Publication
Contributed by Gerry Lewin


O sweet spontaneous

sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty, how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and


buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

-- e.e. cummings (1894-1962)
"O sweet spontaneous" was originally published in The Dial Volume LXVIII, Number 5 (May 1920). New York: The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.
Contributed by Jody Millward


Why I Am in Love with Librarians

I love how they know things
only to pass them on,
how they fade into the faux-wood-paneled
walls of the reference room,
their faces hidden between the covers of books,

how they look up only to help you:
What is the capital of Afghanistan?
How do the Maori bury their dead?
Who invented Barbie? How many were murdered in Guatemala in '84?

—every query worthy of their attention,
any questioner taken seriously,
curiosity the only requirement.
I love how they listen, their lined faces opening,
their eyes already elsewhere:

scanning a plain for the lights of a distant city,
hunting for bodies in the highlands,
searching the web for Barbie—
their minds like those flocks of little birds in winter
swooping over a landscape, looking, looking.

And always when they get back to you,
that sweet smile on their faces,
pride and deep affection for what can be known,
as if Barbie's invention
or the tally of the massacred

could save you, could save the world!
And who knows if Stalin or Hitler
had spent their youth in the library,
history might be rewritten,
re-catalogued by librarians?

Curiosity sends us out
to a world both larger and smaller
than what we know and believe in
with a passion for finding an answer
or at least understanding our questions.

That road is paved with librarians,
bushwhackers, scouts with string
through the labyrinths of information,
helpers who disappear the moment
you reach your destination.

by Julia Alvarez -- Library Journal, 1/15/2003
Contributed by Elizabeth Bowman

I declare myself guilty of not having
made, with these hands they gave me,
a broom.

Why have I made no broom?

Why was I given hands?

What good have they been
if all I ever did was
watch the stir of the grain,
listen to the wind,
and did not gather straws
still green in the earth
for a broom,
not set the soft stalks to dry
and bind them
in a gold bundle,
and did not lash a wooden stick
to the yellow skirt
till I had a broom for the paths?

So it goes:
How did my life get by
without seeing, and learning,
and gathering and binding
the basic things?
It's too late to deny
I had the time,
the time,
yet the hands were lacking,
so how could I
aim for greatness
if I was never able
to make a broom,
not one,
not even one?

Pablo Neruda
trans. John Felstiner
contributed by Nina Warner


The Voice You Hear

The voice you hear when you read silently
is not silent, it is a speaking-out-loud voice in your head; it is spoken,
a voice is saying it
as you read. It's the writer's words,
of course, in a literary sense
his or her "voice" but the sound
of that voice is the sound of your voice.
Not the sound your friends know
or the sound of a tape played back
but your voice
caught in the dark cathedral
of your skull, your voice heard
by an internal ear informed
by internal abstracts
and what you know by feeling,
having felt.
It is your voice
saying, for example, the word "barn"
that the writer wrote
but the "barn" you say
is a barn you know or knew.
The voice in your head,
speaking as you read,
never says anything neutrally- some people
hated the barn they knew,
some people love the barn they know
so you hear the word loaded
and a sensory constellation is lit:
horse-gnawed stalls,
hayloft, black heat tape wrapping
a water pipe, a slippery
spilled chirr of oats from a spilt sack,
the bony, filthy haunches of cows...
And "barn" is only a noun- no verb
or subject has entered into the sentence yet!
The voice you hear when you read
to yourself
is the clearest voice:
you speak it
speaking to you.

by Thomas Lux
Contributed by Anita Cruse


The Reason I Like Chocolate

The reason I like chocolate
is I can lick my fingers
and nobody tells I’m not polite

I especially like scary movies
‘cause I can snuggle with mommy
or my big sister and they don’t laugh

I like to cry sometimes ‘cause everybody says “What’s the matter don’t cry”

And I like books
for all those reasons
but mostly
‘cause they just make me happy

and I really like to be happy

By Nickki Giovanni
Contributed by Anita Cruse

A Gift

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.

By Denise Levertov
Sands of the Well
Contributed by Nina Mahaffey

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