After School, In Free Verse

Growing up in a Catholic family can be difficult for a rambunctious and inquisitive little boy. Although God was always a choice in our house growing up; and although my parents were very liberal with their views on religious tolerance; school was a much different story.

My parents did not administer religion with the same enforcement as did the parents of some of my friends and relatives. Religion was ever-present but treated with the same importance as, say, water – you couldn’t live without it, but too much and you’d drown. But, alas, that was at home… we attended Parochial school and regardless of what the views were at home… at school they owned us – and I nearly drowned.

Nuns, priests, and Brothers of the Order were my charges at school. For years I didn’t know a teacher could even be non-clergy. I was a very smart boy who could not seem to avoid trouble. I was constantly being kept after school for something that by most rational standards was not even punishable…

I wrote this poem around the time my daughters started school as I reminisced about my own experiences; but I suspect it has always lived inside me. Ultimately, I suppose, I got a lot out of my years of the uber-disciplinary ways of the cloth as it played a role in making me who I am today; and if nothing else, I mastered the art of selling tootsie-roll tubes and magazine subscriptions door to door in order to finance the church’s new roof – with the unanimous endorsement of all three members of the holy trinity, of course…  I still remember those afternoons after school silently riding home in the back seat staring down at the paste on my hands – formed from chalk residue and tears…

After School

The blackboard glowers upon the wall

Deleted words now clouds and specks

The unclean blank slate thirsts for chalk

Before a crowd of empty desks

A small hand reaches high to scrawl

To one abbess staring – vacant –

Through the window at clouded skies

The child glances; the hand begins

To atone for sins with a hundred lies

“I will not daydream in class again,

I will not daydream in class again...”

I felt the ironies within this poem (the daydreaming abbess, the atonement through sin, etc.) was best revealed within one more irony – the use of free verse to frame something as structured and formal as a Parochial school punishment… hope you enjoyed this one…