The Beginning Of Class Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Who am I,
In my open wound,
Like the orifice of the ants’ new mound,
The sandy brail
Convexed in the cloudy mourning,
Before school has begun,
And the janitors have yet to arrive
In their beat-up Fords
And unlock the gates:
Then there are still maidens weeping
Above the red clay of the baseball diamond,
Weeping the dew hidden in the veiling
Changing room,
And the earth is swept where
It is redacted, and made up to look presentable:
A bridesmaid with no arms to which
The alligators are sobbing their smiles,
The torpid morbidity of the languid reptiles
Watching the awakening fairy-tale
Of the new mammals’ bolero:
The sudden accidents we all must watch,
While the yellow busses line up
In a queue of noisy youth,
The children swarming out like ants smelling
A picnic, measured by their geometry teachers:
They perform chaotic angles in coincidence
Swathed with mosquitoes,
The wavering reflections in the backyard
Pools, the indistinguishable juxtapositions
Of the prehistoric youth:
They walk by you like the bourgeois,
And you are a crack in the wall a shadow
Disappeared into,
The space between life and death,
Wakened too early for the boisterous living,
The tardy student lingering in the vacated hallway
After the bell has rung the beginning of class.