Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition - runner up poem by Siobahn Harvey

The teacher’s teachers

by Siobhan Harvey

 

Drawing out clock-stopping days of old, their lessons

impressed upon their students’ memories, as chalk on

blackboard or pen on paper, learned rote and handed down

the generations along with division, subtraction

and ball and stick: all that labour as unforgiving

as cane, buckled belt or worn-out tennis pump;

all that ancestry, like quill and ink, readily dismissed today.

Yet in our electronic new age where font purifies scribble,

text destroys talk, and the teacher’s teachers are laid, like poems

by Shelley, Coleridge and Keats, to rest, something’s lost.

The teacher’s teachers who abandoned everything

for communes, free-love, free-range kids and writing

reams of cadent, exquisite words; who remembers them?

Who cares for those whose sabbaticals built barricades

at Bastion Point, whose songs of protests carried as far

as ’81, back to Rugby Park and Molesworth Street?

Or those named after goddesses, who became

feminists at Otago and Harvard, wrote books about

the mutilation of women, repaired to parliament

where they outlawed genetic modification and ended

their days shoplifting in Porirua; who remembers them? 

From ethereal, empty classrooms, the forgotten look down

on us, puzzled by our ‘no winners, no losers’, resource rich, child-

centred, lifelong learner, global citizen, generously budgeted epoch.

Bells ring. Still the forgotten wait for us to look up to them

and observe their versatility and their extremes. 

Footnote:
Full details on winner and runners-up on blog yesterday