Poem

I'm kicking off National Poetry Month with a sestina I wrote when I was teaching high school. It appeared last year in the St. Louis Writer's Guild newsletter (although unfortunately the last line got chopped off when it was printed).




Teaching Poetry

In English class, we study poems:
sonnets, villanelles, haiku. Every day,
restless teenagers read aloud words
and lines and verses. I ask questions
about meaning, form. The students talk
to one another, and to me.

I don’t know why they look to me
to interpret the textbook’s poems.
They just want to talk
to each other all day,
finding answers in their questions,
finding comfort in quick words

of their own, not the words
of vanished poets. As for me,
in class I craft questions;
out of class, these poems.
I try writing every day,
but most nights I’d rather talk

with my husband, quiet talk
over mugs of tea: ordinary words
sturdy and soothing at the end of the day.
Wednesday, a student found me
after school and held out poems,
his forehead lined with questions.

“I guess I don’t know what questions
to ask,” he said as we began to talk.
He looked at Hardy’s poems.
“I think I understand the words,
but they don’t mean any more to me
than the story within them.” That day,

as I left school for the day
my mind swarmed with questions
about the questions he’d asked me.
What good was all this talk
of simile and metaphor? All I had were words
to talk about other words, the poems.

I’ve questioned the poems
that questioned me; the words
today refused to talk.