Teacher

Mary O’Donnell

Summer beckons, jostles the girls
who stare at a poem.
I'm done with them, weary of their battle
for the warm whip of the sun, straining to live what they read.
Blameless, of course.
Who could be still
and not anguished, giddy,
as drifts of blossom
eddy outside like pink snow? Soon there'll be prizes, goodbyes. I shall become again
the half-remembered voice from a place of imprisonment,
a rudiment of chalk and red ink,
shall inhabit a cupboard
in someone's mind,
locked in the past as they ascend inert and adult asylums.

 

Page 27, Poetry Ireland Review Issue 26