Blog o’ Gnosis

Are we bloggers going to do another poetry fest in honor of St. Brigid? Her day is less than a week away, and I’ve had an old poem rattling around in my brain lately, so I figure I’ll beat the crowds and post it a few days early.

This is from the days when I was a substitute teacher, really one of the worst jobs in the world. I taught everything from kindergarten (which gave me a huge headache—the chaos! the noise!) to high school (tough when you’re not so much older than some of the guys in the back of the classroom).

It was great fodder for creative writing, however. I couldn’t stand the feeling of absolute outsider-ness that came from taking my bag lunch into the teacher’s room at noon, so would stay in the classroom, haul out my notebook and write. This is one of my favorites from that period.

Guerneville Girls

If these were my own kids I’d slap
them silly, and when they came to
me again with putty in their hair,
or quiet walking, fingering a note of
ownership from some boy with the right
shoes, I’d send the wind down at them
first, unglue the stars and decorations
in the gym, throw out the desks and
tables and start delivering babies
there, on the floor. The mothers will
be the kind who curse and rant and
swear to God that man won’t lay another
finger on them, look what he did to
me that bastard, and where is he now?
The girls will unlace their shoes and
slip quickly behind my back to the
river, where they will not be able
to resist the urge to throw off their
slim jeans and wade, murky, to where
the river becomes real, and a threat,
and they will learn to swim against
it as though strength were a good
thing. Then the moon could draw
down into their bellies and meet no
resistance, sliding on through to where
muddy feet stand gripping the banks
of wideness, silt and foam, and
the white track across the water would
be more than chalk on an empty board.

Anne Hill, Fall 1990

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.