Explore Poems: School & Learning

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Among School Children
By William Butler Yeats
I

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way—the children's eyes
In momentary...
Gratitude
By Cornelius Eady
I’m here
to tell you
an old story.
This
Appears to be
my work.
I live
in the world,
Walk
the streets…
Into the Weeds
By Kevin Prufer
The brutality of those two men
who broke into her apartment
and murdered her boyfriend,
...
Stunt Double
By Tomás Q. Morín
In this life, there are stars
and there are stunt doubles.

Before I became one of those fathers
obsessed with memorizing his lines,
making peace with the Big Director
in the sky who doesn’t like ad libs,
before all that, I was the star
of my own...
Force Visibility
By Solmaz Sharif
Everywhere we went, I went
in pigtails
no one could see—

ribbon curled
by a scissor’s sharp edge,
the bumping our cars

undertook when hitting
those strips
along the interstate

meant to shake us
awake. Everywhere we went
horses bucking

their riders off,
holstered pistols
or two Frenchies

dancing in black and white
in a torn-apart
living...
Jesus on the Iron Cross
By Jim Daniels
The strongest boy in our high school
on the edge of Detroit did not play
sports—he would’ve had to cut
his long blond Samson hair
and put away his switchblade
and stop smoking dope.

The gone-to-seed coaches who taught
gym class hated him for the beauty
they could...
Linnaeus in Lapland
By Lorine Niedecker
Nothing worth noting
except an Andromeda
with quadrangular shoots—
            the boots
of the people

wet inside: they must swim
to church thru the floods
or be taxed—the blossoms
            from the bosoms
of the leaves

*

Fog-thick morning—
I see only
where I now walk. I carry
            my clarity
with me.

*

Hear
where her snow-grave is
the You
            ah you
of...
Advice to the Able-Bodied Poet Entering the Disability Poetics Workshop
By Liv Mammone
1. Let's just save time—Yes I have seen Rain Man, The Miracle Worker, My Left Foot, or, more recently, The Theory of Everything. I wanna fuck Daniel Day Lewis too but can we not?

2. If all the the Special Needs...
VI. Ideas
By Anne Carson
Eventually Geryon learned to write.

____

His mother's friend Maria gave him a beautiful notebook from Japan
with a fluorescent cover.

On the cover Geryon wrote Autobiography. Inside he set down the facts.

Total Facts Known About Geryon.

Geryon was a monster everything about him was red....
If Your Hands Are Full of Fire
By L.A. Johnson
The book from the archive
whispers with handwriting. A gold pen shines
the name of every man,
his every hand that closed it shut.
If girls ever read, they were crossed
out. The gilded slashes still burn
the wounded. In the right environment, they say,
every cell...
Love Song for Ayumi
By Marianne Chan
Ayumi never spoke in class, never responded to anyone who talked to her, and I tried talking to her once, no reply, but I loved her fleecy hair, her pants too short, not in fashion, ahead of her time in...
in another string of the multiverse, perhaps
By Michaella Batten
i.

i am sitting in sunday school
in a handsewn pink dress and white lace tights

i am putting my hand down when we
learn about david and jonathan

i am not asking if king david was bi
i am taking communion

i am bowing my head...
Taking It
By Vievee Francis
I never remember the knuckles, though
his hand was bare, though their hands were bare.
I remember the impressions left on this skin, the
wilting and the welting. I don't remember the sound,
not one smack. I remember the falls, myself falling
to the floor...
Undone
By Padma Venkatraman
They ignored the new boy,
snickering behind his back.

In silence, I stayed safe.
...
Nowhere Else to Go
By Linda Sue Park
Turn off the lights.
Wear another layer.
(Sounds like a dad.)
(Sounds like a mom.)

You say hand-me-down.
I say retro.

Walk.
Bike.
Walk some more.
Recycle.

(See what I did there,
bike—recycle?)

Your name in Sharpie
on a good water bottle.
Backpack. New habits.
No thanks, don’t need a bag.

What else.
Oh yeah.

Tell ten friends
who...
School—12:15
By Tina Boyer Brown
Imagine the lunchroom,
crowded and wary—
seating charts a welcome apprehension.

Loose-leaf
papers spiraled from
ballpoint-scratched notebook covers
until the last hour,
when a teacher
sighed and sighed.

Today, we close our backpacks,
but minutes
come quick and quit
the ease of dawn.
At the Student Poetry Reading
By Kim Stafford
I guess you could call me broken,
says one. I’m still lonely, says another,
but now I can name it with a song.

In my poem, says another,
I can forget I am forgotten. Now
I understand being misunderstood,

says another. And another says,
in a bold,...
A smile always heals
By Suma Subramaniam
You cannot pronounce my name.
“Soor-ya.” Not “soar.”
Surya—the sun god.
Mom always tells me that a smile heals everything.
So I try.
I sit beside you in the cafeteria
and smile.

You look down at your food
and eat your cheeseburger,
I eat the lemon rice in my...
One of Us
By Joyce Sidman
“That kid is weird,” says
the teacher, flipping her shining hair.
“I don’t know where he’s at.”
Indeed, he is quiet
in the way of a giraffe:
ears tuned to something we can’t hear.
He turns his sleepy eyes on me—
chocolate brown
with long, extraordinary lashes—
as I...
American Citizenship
By Wu Sheng
Out here in the sticks
You rarely encounter such genius:
"Come, come, come to Taiwan U
Go, go, go to the US"
Words passed with envy from mouth to mouth
Giving the hometown high hopes

Then I heard you've become an American citizen
You're very busy
With house...

p1Stunt Double

p1Jesus on the Iron Cross

p1If Your Hands Are Full of Fire

p1Love Song for Ayumi

p1in another string of the multiverse, perhaps

p1Undone

p1Nowhere Else to Go

p1School—12:15

p1At the Student Poetry Reading

p1A smile always heals

p1One of Us

Stunt Double

Jesus on the Iron Cross

If Your Hands Are Full of Fire

Love Song for Ayumi

in another string of the multiverse, perhaps

Undone

Nowhere Else to Go

School—12:15

At the Student Poetry Reading

A smile always heals

One of Us