To the Teacher of a Young Child

A Poem by Robert L.

A true story and its broader interpretation...

The cemetery that’s across the way
Bleakly blends with the sky above and lane
By which it’s flanked. It is a dreary day.
This library shelters me from the rain.

Behind me sits a spectacled woman
Her honest voice both soft and stern and smart
Endeavoring to teach a little man
How language is the master key to art.

The little learner struggles to digest
The teacher’s crafty crumbles of ingest:
How to see quote marks, defining a “prop,”
And why the silent “e” we must not drop.

Meanwhile, I looked out the window behind them, my attention apprehended by a scruffy older man, sweatshirt-clad, likely in his mid-fifties, who was carrying two duffel bags. He stopped at a street sign and placed the bags down beneath. He began pacing down the street then back up, as if he were walking off a muscle cramp. Then he picked the bags back up, ambling quickly down the street, his posture rigid, uncomfortable-looking. After 50 yards, he again stopped and dropped his bags, performing the same ritual as before. This system he used until he was a tiny figure hundreds of yards away.
What was in those bags? Why didn’t he tie them together and hoist them over his shoulders? Why was he on that street? Why did he have no help? What stories could be told of this man’s plight! But...

This story would possess no purpose
Without teaching of a weighty dose,
Without learning of an equal amount:
Both quantities of an infinite count.

Keep reading, little boy, until bloodshot
Your little eyes be, and learn all that may;
Without you the man outside walked for naught,
And the sky, stones, and lane will not blend gray.

I see who turns the pages, and softly speaks:
You, ma’am, are the one who sits where I do---
Forsooth many days of many weeks---
Your eyes that see all the things I think I do.