Hello poets,
I will confess to being a satellite observer of your writings this week, especially the responses to Max's poem Deportment which evoked some memories for me (including the frequent prods between my shoulder blades by an over zealous teacher).The last three lines of the poem hark back to a different era of child-raising. 'Problem' children are nicely contrasted with the two well-behaved kids who provide their angle of vision, made richer through irony.
Reading the responses to this poem has prompted me to write a time capsule of my own school days.
I hope I can navigate the rules of file posting
School snap
The inspector peered though
black horn-rimmed glasses
at my handwriting:
looping lower-case fs and ls,
Capital letters with elegant flourishes.
Your chalkboard skills
will be an asset
in your new school —
cursive copperplate learned
at a communal wooden desk
with china inkwells—
the legacy of English education
transported to schools in Victoria.
We clambered behind one another
to enter and exit the row,
miscreants delivering pinches
and finger flicks
until observed by Sister.
The ribboned ends of girls’ plaits dangled
beside (and sometimes into)
inkwells on the desk behind
in the crowded classroom.
I longed to be
(and sometimes was) the one
trusted to pour midnight
blue ink into milk-white wells,
while boys percussed felt dusters
in the breezeway
to exorcise their demons
amid clouds of dust.
In the rebellious 60s
cursive script no longer
taught in primary schools
my style illegible to students
I started to cross my ts
reversed the letter s
separated what had been
laboriously joined.
The permanent callus on my knuckle remains
an embedded fossil of primary education.
Judy Keighran
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