September, the First Day of School
I
My child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave; he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind me how
I cried before that door a life ago.
I may have had a hard time letting go.
Each fall the children must endure together
What every child also endures alone:
Learning the alphabet, the integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That worlds invisible and visible
Bow down before it, as in Joseph’s dream
The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down
Before the dreaming of a little boy.
That dream got him such hatred of his brothers
As cost the greater part of life to mend
And yet great kindness came of it in the end.
II
A school is where they grind the
grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind
the thought.
It may be those two grindings are
but one,
As from the alphabet come
Shakespeare’s Plays,
As from the integers comes Euler’s
Law,
As from the whole, inseparably, the
lives,
The shrunken lives that have not been
set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.
But may they be. My child has
disappeared
Behind the schoolroom door.
And should I live
To see his coming forth, a
life away,
I know my hope, but do not know its
form
Nor hope to know it. May the fathers he finds
Among his teachers have a care of him
More than his father could. How that will look
I do not know, I do not need to know.
Even our tears belong to ritual.
But may great kindness come of it in the end.
---Howard
Nemerov
No comments:
Post a Comment