Of My Poetry Class

Poem

Today, as every previous-year’s day,

I’ll meet a new batch of students

In my poetry class.

May be I‘ll talk to them on Chaucer

On how he d

emocratically portrayed his characters

Or, may be, I’ll, as always,

Romanticize Ginsberg as a Hippi-hero

And elaborate his experiments with sex and drugs;

Or, I may be overtaken by the personal life of Yeats

By failures of his love life

More than the philosophical visions in his poems.

They’ll have expectations

And may end in impressions;

I’ll also have expectations

But I’ll need to continue on those impressions,

The way I’ve been doing these many years.

In the classroom

They’ll be my students

Or, I will be their teacher, by reciprocation.

Very consciously, we’ll build and maintain the distance

Of our being—as a teacher, as students.

Each day, we’ll interact with each other

Through faces-- foamy smiles this time, and frowns at other times.

In the turn of the year, before my poetry classes end

These new faces will soon be registered as ‘gold-old batch’

And I’ll be left to expect new faces again.

At this moment of thought, as always,

I am drawn back to the same question:

With these fleets of fancy-fiery faces,

(As a new teacher to these new students),

Am I simply rehearsing to keep time away?