Many decades after graduation <br />the students sneak back onto <br />the school-grounds at night <br />and within the pane-lit windows <br />catch me their teacher at the desk <br />or blackboard cradling a chalk: <br />someone has erased their youth, <br />and as they crouch closer to see <br />more it grows darker and quieter <br />than they have known in their lives, <br />the lesson never learned surrounds <br />them; why have they come? Is <br />there any more to memorize now <br />at the end than there was then" <br />What is it they peer at through shades <br />of time to hear, X times X repeated, <br />my vain efforts to corner a room's <br />snickers? Do they mock me? Forever? <br />Out there my past has risen in <br />the eyes of all my former pupils but <br />I wonder if behind them others <br />younger and younger stretch away <br />to a world where dawn will never <br />ring its end, its commencement bell.<br /><br />Bill Knott<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/an-instructor-s-dream/
