For An Unnamed Teacher Poem by Michael Shepherd

You know that shot, in films and musicals
glamorising La Révolution Francaise:
a hundred metres away, just fitting into
the camera’s breadth of range,
a crowd which signifies rights withheld
advances on you (safe in bourgeois seat…) ,
led by a token handsome, flushed, tall
kerchiefed man or woman, centre-stage?

Today, that’s me – in upraised hand,
a Bill of Poets’ Rights… You said,
I’m told, that ‘if you were a poet,
you would just write praise…’

Do I detect a note
of implied criticism there? …

Did you not know, that every word that poets write
is praise? First, praise of the language that we use –
its glorious flexibility; praise of the chance to use it
at its height and breadth and depth,
freshly - as if it had never put before
this word with that, and made of it new thought
to lodge within your mind, and warm your heart,
to call from soul to soul, of what souls share…

Advancing on the camera, we shout,
if you don’t know this - that all that, is praise…
then you’re not ready for reading poetry, just yet…
‘For this we stand; for this we live; for this we’ll die’…

The photo-opportunity has come and gone;
the cameramen push back, drive to their editors;
the crowd disperses, glowing with its righteousness;
and leaves the world to darkness, and TV…