THE BOOK OF ORDERS

 

 

It’s blue, it’s there like a stone,

as inert and dead as a bone

on the table in the teachers’ room.

Teachers must check and double-check,

with the same care riders have for their

horse’s girth, what is written in it,

this is the headmaster’s law, take it or leave it

( leave it if you can, leave it all –said to me a friend,

but that was ages and ages ago when” I

was young and foolish”).

So I enter the room, leaf through the book’s pages

still with my coat on and get to the call

of my latest duties beyond the regular teaching,

assemblies, reunions, what the headmaster wants,

whether I like it or not. I never like it.

The word “ unfair” keeps hanging stubbornly

like a sting, in my heart and in the air.

It has been hanging for many a decade,

will it keep hanging until I fade?

 

At the end of the year the book is thick

with the pages of orders pasted in it.

Bones never grow in the earth, they

get yellower and smoother, solemn

in their motionlessness.

This book gets bloated like the corpse

of a drowned man.

Burn, burn the corpse if you can.