Teaching in Addington
The trees were my reward.
Glib, slick,
finessing the light
until it seemed to dream,
they reassured you:
told you that you were no longer
on the hill, as bare as bone.
Its skies, I swear,
were stark and intimate
as someone's mouth;
the hill was like a jaw,
the houses worn away like teeth.
But don't trust me.
I am finessing, too,
each simile
a measure of my own defeat.
If I wasn't at home
it was because I failed to be.
*****
There was blood on the walls.
It came from two Year Seven girls.
It over-reached itself:
glowed with the bright air of carnival.
I had made barriers of my arms.
Had taken pride, it's true,
in making barriers of my arms.
But while my legs tried to take root
I heard myself,
unable to leap the gap
between the things I thought I knew
and everything the children did.
They would have told me if they could:
blood, all blood,
is currency.
Is cogency; just one more truth
I couldn't speak.
*****
Bejay bounced against my arm.
I shouldn't have done it.
He ran and I acted like a wall.
Who did I think
I was protecting?
Me, my ego jabbering away,
although I couldn't have told you
who I was.
We drove them to the coast.
Bejay had never seen a cow.
He was delighted,
but then he glowered
at the way its haunches
took the sun,
as if by right.
He said: "When we get there
what are we supposed to do?"
I said: "Pick shells."
He asked me why.
But, at the shoreline,
he handled them as gently
as if they were all unhoused brains;
each one a genius of place
just like his mother,
her features blossoming reluctantly
when I said I had driven there
to apologise.
*****
Did I make a difference?
No. Maybe.
Foursquare, I held a pose
that influenced
not just the way I stood
but what I made them write.
Light in the pubs
like something parodying light;
meth; scag;
bags scattered across the lawn;
graffiti drooping in defeat;
and Chelsea's dad,
killed just outside her house.
A drug deal, she wrote.
I had to force myself to point out
her apostrophes.
*****
The whole school was rubbed raw.
Not a window or door
that didn't lack love.
Once, I spoke to a man
who drew himself backwards
when I described my day.
It was as if I'd plunged my hand
into a sewer, or electricity.
I wanted to teach him
that his urbane expression,
this air he had of being a needle
flickering
over life's little ironies,
was just another form of self-disgust.
He should have asked me
which of us,
me or the kids,
was teaching who.
Which is another way of saying:
don't think that I didn't love them,
because I did.
This poem was originally published in the Culture Matters' anthology The Cry of the Poor. Alan Humm is the editor of One Hand Clapping and is currently looking for a home for his collection, A Brief and Biased History of Love.