World Teachers’ Day
An education celebration honoring the teachers who have impacted our lives, featuring poems by Colleen Anderson, Harry Bauld, and Gail DiMaggio.
TRANSCRIPT
Oh, before we go any further, some big news. Passager’s latest book—just out—is by California poet Kathy O’Fallon, Proof of Life. We’re going to celebrate the event with a Zoom reading by Kathy. It’s Sunday, October 18 at 2:00 Eastern time. You can register for the Zoom on Passager’s web site.
It’s that time of year when we celebrate teachers, their commitment to childen and teens– despite all the bureaucracy and discipline problems and overcrowding and lack of supplies and on and on. We celebrate them for all they do and have done for all of us. On this episode of Burning Bright, some pieces by and about teachers.
Colleen Anderson said that her first experience with Zoom was during the pandemic with a class of 18 Montessori students. She said, “We blundered our way through a two-week workshop, abandoning plans for an in-person play and substituting online monologues. The children rose to the challenge!” Here’s Colleen’s poem “May 2020: The Children in Their Bedrooms.”
have studied the Old Kingdom for weeks;
have gathered facts like strands of gold,
from Wikipedia, Google, and dusty
rows of World Books in their basements;
have brought, in turn, to our checkered
Zoom workshop, deserts and pyramids,
the Nile’s fertile crescent, hieroglyphics,
mummified cats and gem-encrusted scarabs.
Today is the grand finale: monologues
in the persons of Ancient Egyptian deities.
One by one, on my Macintosh screen,
they appear in their makeshift costumes.
I confess, I’ve lost track of their given names
as I watch them arrive—not Ben,
at this point. What comes to my tongue
but Ra, with regal bearing and braided beard;
not Gabe, but Sobek, the crocodile god,
stealthy inside his sharp-toothed headdress;
not Mia, but Hathor, with kohl-rimmed eyes;
not Charlotte, but Ma’at, goddess of truth.
Here is Horus, with a curved falcon’s beak
and wings from his sister’s Halloween costume;
here’s Khepri, who pushes the sun across the sky,
and Sekhmet, with her insatiable thirst for blood.
And here, around the gods, their bedrooms:
beds and bedside tables, crayoned drawings
and movie posters, closet doors and ceiling fans,
stuffed animals, calendars, wastebaskets,
dolls – all the taken-for-granted things
that make a child feel safe and restless,
now that the world has collapsed to a room.
Here is Tefnut, goddess of morning dew,
daughter of Ra, whose tears cause green sprouts
to rise from parched earth. She pounds her staff
on the bedroom floor. Behind her, the blinds
quiver with her passion. And I believe
that orange balloon, which bobs and sways
on top of her ten-year-old head, is the sun.
From Passager’s 2024 Poetry Contest issue, “May 2020: The Children in Their Bedrooms” by Colleen Anderson.
Harry Bauld has taught English at The Putney School in Vermont and at Horace Mann School in New York. He also wrote the book The Uncorrected Eye which Passager published several years ago. Here from that book, “Fourth Grade.” It begins with this epigraph by Dean Young: “Everyone is a wonderful poet… through third grade.”
The fish can no longer be
of whatever color it please
God. Trees have pulled up
their pants into a postcard
of autumn. What are these girls
doing here, different from anything
in nature or the imagination? Your sex
that was a clown nose is now a piece
of the rood, and look!
here is your hand, a friend
to venerate the mysteries
with you. Your pencils
lose weight and there is your hair
in the mirror like crazed starlings.
The pet corn snake must curl
still in his cage, not wind
among the bookshelves,
where once he forked a tongue
through the dusty dispensations.
Now the world,
once so close, moves away,
and you must learn
its forwarding address with your fingers
cut on the sharp envelope
of tomorrow where the seven magic words
for all matter that once rang
from each day’s glossary
have gone missing. The sky
shrinks into chemistry
and the dancing animal clouds
stack themselves in an order
you must get right
for the test, their secret names
vanishing in a puff of dead language.
Harry Bauld’s poem “Fourth Grade” from his book The Uncorrected Eye.
Gail DiMaggio was the 2021 Passager Poet. Her poem is a metta, a Buddhist practice which she said mimics the experience of focusing on the hope that the subject will find peace, joy, compassion, or any other condition that might lighten their suffering. “Metta for Mackie Who Taught Me.”
what six foot looks like on a woman,
what West Texas sounds like
when it’s calling out Milton’s ferocious
angels, lining them up against the long,
brown wall of Thames, Room 106.
One windy Sunday she strode
the quad wearing a cape
dark blue as El Paso dusk
and I knew forever after
that a woman could wear a cape.
I never called her Mackie to her face,
I called her Mrs., a title
she accepted as her due along with
the last name of the respected poet
she’d years ago divorced.
The day he stepped in front of a train,
we wondered. Would she elegize?
would she slacken?
But then she swept down on us
out of the winter rain –
decked in fire engine red,
hair pinned up in her Valkyrie way –
and read us Irish poets for an hour.
I swear to you: those uncaulked windows
rattled in iambic
when Mackie read Yeats.
Gail DiMaggio’s “Metta for Mackie Who Taught Me.”
To buy Harry Bauld’s book The Uncorrected Eye,” or order Passager’s 2026 Poetry Contest issue, subscribe to, donate to, or learn more about Passager and its commitment to older writers, visit passagerbooks.com.
Passager offers a 25% discount on the books and journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what’s on sale this week.
For Christine, Rosanne, Mary, Johnny, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
Due to the limitations of online publishing, poems may not appear in their original formatting.
