Far far from gusty waves these children's faces. <br />Like rootless weeds, the hair torn around their pallor. <br />The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paper- <br />seeming boy, with rat's eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir <br />Of twisted bones, reciting a father's gnarled disease, <br />His lesson from his desk. At back of the dim class <br />One unnoted, sweet and young. His eyes live in a dream, <br />Of squirrel's game, in the tree room, other than this. <br /> <br />On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare's head, <br />Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities. <br />Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map <br />Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these <br />Children, these windows, not this world, are world, <br />Where all their future's painted with a fog, <br />A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky, <br />Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words. <br /> <br />Surely, Shakespeare is wicked, and the map a bad example <br />With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal-- <br />For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes <br />From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children <br />Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel <br />With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones. <br />All of their time and space are foggy slum. <br />So blot their maps with slums as big as doom. <br /> <br />Unless, governor, teacher, inspector, visitor, <br />This map becomes their window and these windows <br />That shut upon their lives like catacombs, <br />Break O break open 'till they break the town <br />And show the children green fields and make their world <br />Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues <br />Run naked into books, the white and green leaves open <br />History is theirs whose language is the sun.<br /><br />Stephen Spender<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/an-elementary-school-classroom-in-a-slum/
