Pocket Poem #5: Eulogy for an English Teacher

You died a few days after Easter—

suddenly, in distress.

They said the last sounds

recorded in your call

were the shallow rasps of your breath.

The Three Fates of ancient myth

who twined in their fingers

the threads of mortal life

shuddered, too, at what they did:

as they sheared your line

they found the cut unclean,

the edges frayed, your fibers

gnawed against the blades.

It was you who taught us

how to imagine those ancient myths:

the skyward stretch of Daphne’s arms

as her body turned to wood,

the rapturous glow on Pscyhe’s face

as she gazed at lamp-lit Cupid

sleeping at her foot,

the endless tears of Niobe

weeping, weeping for her children,

her heart turned to stone.

That, you said, was tragedy.

But what did tragedy mean to us then?

Sixteen, we were, feeling invincible.

We were too young to know what it was.

But after these many years of living,

despair and longing have visited us,

crises of mind and heart,

and grief and anguish beyond our

knowing what to do.

So we have come, wonderingly, to feel

that the tragedy in those myths

you read aloud so lovingly to us

was true after all, and real.

Now in this world without you,

we bring this offering: we ask

that in our sleep you may recite again

those ancient myths,

stories we can now live by,

songs to rock us gently through

the night, the truthfulness

which only manmade tales can give.

Would it give you any comfort—

any peace—if from the rim of heaven

you saw that we are learning from you—

and from those ancient myths—still?