STEPS

And well, life goes on. For me everything is both the same and completely different.In my Time After.

The circumstances that made me write the poem I am going to enclose here haven't changed one bit. This dull, blind acceptance of rules most of teachers ( sorry but even if I am I can't consider myself part of them) "ineluctably" keep implementing.

Since I found myself talking about this while answering Jim Murdoch in a comment, I feel I can continue in this post.

It's almost a merely descriptive poem and maybe, I am afraid, the end can be considered obscure but it came so strongly and so at once that I have never since touched the work.


STEPS

On this long corridor
between two rows of desks.
Stiletto heels with their thin
steady hammering,
or sandals, flat,
too easily pretending relax
or squelching rubber soles
so full of road,
in this hazy light from the low
glass walls, a drowsy glare
on the beige floor.
They sit at their desks on the corridor,
their faces change every year
but not their eyes
with veins of scared smiles
in the blank space
from the ceiling to their papers
between a packet of biscuits
and a bottle of mineral water.
And coughs and whispers,
the shifting of infinitesimal rustles.

You walk and sit, you survey.
And give advice, your job,
dispensing certainties.
And you can’t avoid getting caught
in the surging river of comments
of others like you,
the murmurs and silences,
the eddies of sudden small outbursts
with in the middle of it all
the practised surveyor’s smile,
the broad –I know, I know…
time and again we’ve passed
through this.

Only
you never manage to say
if we will ever awake.