Poetry, Everyday

So as a high school English teacher, I'm starting a new unit on poetry for my juniors. One of the roles, as I see it, of a poetry teacher in high school is to act as a talent scout for poems. Not every poem is going to work if you try to teach it to 17-year-olds. For example, nearly every poem in the 32-copies of the Literary Anthology that is sitting in my classroom. I am not going to teach "Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant or "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot. So I've been pouring through anthologies and collections, trying to collect like about 200 poems that I think are worth reading and teaching. I'm up to about 42.

So, when I find them, I'm going to put them up for you folks to read. Since I'm sure, like vitamins, you're not getting your recommended daily allowance of poetry either.

So here goes. This first one goes out to my dad, and Dads everywhere.

Sign for my father, who stressed the bunt
David Bottoms (b. 1949)

On the rough diamond,
the hand-cut field beneath the dog lot and the barn,
we rehearsed the strict technique
of bunting. I watched from the infield,
the mound, the backstop
as your left hand climbed the bat, your legs
and shoulders squared toward the pitcher.
You could drop it like a seed
down either base line. I admired your style,
but not enough to take my eyes off the bank
that served as our center-field fence.

Years passed, three leagues of organized ball,
no few lives. I could homer
into the garden beyond the bank,
into the left-field lot of Carmichael Motors,
and still you stressed the same technique,
the crouch and spring, the lead arm absorbing
just enough impact. That whole tiresome pitch
about basics never changing,
and I never learned what you were laying down.

Like the hand brushed across the bill of a cap,
let this be the sign
I'm getting a grip on the sacrifice.