The English Teacher. Poem by Marshall E Gass

At first, pimply faced and shy to look and touch
you took the stars from the sky and implanted them
into my crisp clean English Essay as if the words
were silhouetted in the embroidery of the night.

I was struck by this teacher who lived in a space
that filled his skull cap with beauty in everything.

Soon the floodgates opened and my own words
mingled with ecstasies and rituals of writing,
danced across the page in rhyme and reason
and spilled over into vast tracts of books and
writings and thousands of printed pages
all with your signature hidden in the prose
and poetry of teaching me to search for meaning
in every single word. What a journey.

Today as I shift some words and visuals
into subtle pictures I remember the first ones you spoke
to a shy little boy, afraid of others seeing his writing:

' Go dance with the delicate, spin magic with
every sentence and dress those pictures in tailcoats
and ties, so others may know that your pen is
dipped in poetic polish of a special kind'

Thank you Bro D'Arcy.
Author Notes

A tribute to Bro D'Arcy, my English Teacher at St Josephs College, Coonoor, who first recognised that my writing was different. The good man never ever made a negative comment and each time he looked at my schoolboy writing, he would delicately carve his calligraphic handwriting suggesting how better I could improve the language.

Sometimes, I would write and re-write a poem dozens of times until it merged into the best poem possible.

'Every word spoken or written with part of you in it makes you a better person'- Bro D'Arcy

I owe Bro D'arcy, a lifetime of learning to write better.
© Marshall Gass. All rights reserved.