Cheers to taking leaps. I love you for reading.
Exit Interview
I won’t
conduct an exit interview
before I
leave this place for good,
but if I
did, it would likely entail questions
about my
experience, reflections
on growth
and grades and the ways
of this
district.
I doubt
they’d ask about my students,
those young
minds consuming the thought cloud
resting
above my right shoulder,
a final
image for the reader to capture before this story ends.
Suppose the process was all procedure,
a printout of questions from district headquarters.
I’d
stop them and say this:
I hope,
during my time here
I encouraged
one student to toe the cliffs of his limits,
to leap into
thin air because it felt right and not because
the world
expected him to.
I hope a
student’s bad day was made, just once,
from a silly
note or poem I wrote, the words glistening
in their
inky glory, the only light such a kid would see that day.
I hope they
learned the power of language,
the way
words can team up into a violent army,
burn holes through the soul of another with an easy flick of a trigger,
but how words,
those same words, can just as easily
drop their
weapons, hold up their hands in peace
and build
something no army can destroy.
I hope my
students learned to love a book,
or stories,
the realest expressions of people;
I hope one
of them, at least one, grew angry
at a man
that didn't exist anywhere but on a page.
I hope the
word “poetry” will not make them shudder,
but smile,
and when others chastise the art they defend it
like their
little brother on a playground being taunted by bullies,
explain how
beautiful it is,
how each
piece of it was selected carefully by its creator,
arranged in
such a way that someone may see it
and love it
for who it is, for what it reveals on the surface
and what
lies beneath—the good stuff, that which is only found when
one invests thought and care into the poem.
And I hope,
for at least some of my students,
I will be
that poem, the one they turn to
because they
know what they’ll get,
a message
that understands them.
I hope they
grin each time they flip to me,
read me, or
even think of me—how I may be resting
on some
bookshelf in the dark,
believing in
them,
waiting,
smiling,
old and
distant,
But always
there.
