Search through 19 years of classroom poetry here—you might find your poem.
A Poem about the difficulties facing teachers once there was a cellphone in every student’s face. It is written as a response to William Butler Yeat’s poem THE SECOND COMING
The Second Coming
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Things Fall Apart-(My answer to William Butler Yeats’ poem)
Dear Mr. Yeats, it is true, what you said.
When, in a small classroom, 35 teenaged souls
all heading in separate directions
collide with me, the largest mammal in the room,
the pain extends beyond the physical, it corrupts the
psyche, and like a cancer, it grows, eating its way
to the core of society.
Today’s teacher is thrown into the Lebrea Tar Pits with
all the other dinosaurs, and the
largest mammal in the room is not large at all.
Tiny power in adolescent hands,
ipod, ipad,upad,wepad,theypad,droid,
fake knowledge is free and in the hands of the
proudly ignorant rebels at all times.
they want nothing from me but fodder for their tweets (but they do not know what fodder means) and
they stand up angrily for their rights
to do what they want, when they want
and inside they are certain of this inalienable right,
although they do not know what the word means,
‘inalienable’.
No. Large mammals who do not tweet or love
reality tv have no right to impart anything.
the generally smaller mammals with their
handheld connection to all
are clearly superior, and in charge,
and have the right to speak to everyone in the entire world
at the same time I have lost the right
to teach.
It is true as you say WB Yeats
“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold”
and technology is that rough beast,
its hour come round at last, slouching away from
me.
CRAY 2012
