If the Internet has one good use, in my opinion, it is to reunite us with random things we think we've lost. What DID Donny from New Kids on the Block actually look like? How DO you make vichisoisse, again? What else happened in that episode of Pee-wee's Playhouse where we meet Ricardo, the best soccer player in the world?
I have spent pretty much all of my online time (speaking in the most casual, Internet searching sense of the term only) looking for one specific poem. And I finally found it. When I was a Sophomore in high school, I went to a writing conference (I'll avoid the details, as they involve a particular swanky Connecticut prep school, whose name may rhyme with "Schmingswood Schmoxford") and I encountered two poets I fell in love with for the rest of my life. One, Sue Ellen Thompson, is easy to find online and I love everything she writes. The other, read only one poem, and his poem was lost to me forever...well, forever until now.
Without ever knowing that I, myself, would end up teaching students about my own age when I first heard this poem, I fell in love with a poem about a teacher whose student had a seizure in the classroom while giving a presentation. It is a beautiful poem, and I think it speaks for itself. My apologies for giving so much background already.
We All Fall Down
for Kelly, my student
Her turn had come. She knew
by heart almost
the lines she was to speak
but gave us, God help her,
the truth
beyond the lines,
beyond the book she dropped,
its pages thrashing to the floor
like broken wings—
she beat her head upon,
bit into so hard
I could not pry her jaws,
teeth grinding—
the truth beyond us
she saw as ever,
her risen eyes gone white
as bone.
I did what I could,
I held her and held her, seized
with sudden love and knowing
we all fall down.
In the end
I carried her curled in my arms
across one threshold
and another.
-Rennie McQuilkin
Still at Sea!
14 years ago
