The Second Coming July 2012

Search through 19 years of classroom poetry here—you might find your poem.

A Poem about the difficulties facing teachers once there was a cellphone in every student’s face. It is written as a response to William Butler Yeat’s poem THE SECOND COMING

The Second Coming 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Things Fall Apart-(My answer to William Butler Yeats’ poem)

Dear Mr. Yeats, it is true, what you said.

When, in a small classroom, 35 teenaged souls

all heading in separate directions

collide with me, the largest mammal in the room,

the pain extends beyond the physical, it corrupts the

psyche, and like a cancer, it grows, eating its way

to the core of society.

Today’s teacher is thrown into the Lebrea Tar Pits with

all the other dinosaurs, and the

largest mammal in the room is not large at all.

Tiny power in adolescent hands,

ipod, ipad,upad,wepad,theypad,droid,

fake knowledge is free and in the hands of the

proudly ignorant rebels at all times.

they want nothing from me but fodder for their tweets (but they do not know what fodder means) and

they stand up angrily for their rights

to do what they want, when they want

and inside they are certain of this inalienable right,

although they do not know what the word means,

‘inalienable’.

No. Large mammals who do not tweet or love

reality tv have no right to impart anything.

the generally smaller mammals with their

handheld connection to all

are clearly superior, and in charge,

and have the right to speak to everyone in the entire world

at the same time I have lost the right

to teach.

It is true as you say WB Yeats

“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold”

and technology is that rough beast,

its hour come round at last, slouching away from

me.

CRAY 2012

bring me a rock and I will know who you are

Ok that is a weird start. My intention here is to share all of the poems I wrote about students over the past 20 years in the classroom that I felt really captured their essence.

Over the years, I have felt, rightly or not, that I know my students very well. I am honored when I read their essays or poems, or anything where their voice comes through.  I feel it is similar to asking for a rock from Paris rather than a T-shirt.

 I don't want gifts when friends and family travel, what I really want is a rock from their trip. I want them to be in a beautiful place, think of me, and pick up a rock from  underfoot.  Then I feel as if I was there. 

similarly,

I want the students to give me something genuine from themselves, and that's what I wanted the most---more important to me on a human level than a formulaic essay or straight A work. It was the rocks my students brought me that helped me know them and celebrate them. And to me, that is the most important part of my work as an English teacher.

And in this blog, I will share my students with you.