The personal learning network for educators
This poem is a tribute to Sir Ken Robinson's, The Element- and its essential insights about the importance of nurturing students passions-
Lines By Lori Polachek
Cutting one’s own offspring’s
umbilical cord is a challenge,
even for someone as powerful
as the Almighty. Three to six
years of study are required
to notarize a deed of sale or audit
debits and credits. I couldn’t find
a college with even a one-year Major
in Motherhood. Being a middle child,
I settled for Commerce-ever determined
to close in on my brother’s two-year
head start in life. He wasn’t threatened
by me, any more than Coke is by Pepsi.
That’s how it is when you’re “the real thing”-
Too busy selling bottles, and cans-
to worry about taste tests.
Pepsi could learn a thing or two.
We all could.
Freedom is the smelly, rotten
cheese promised in grade school
for jumping through mind-numbing
Pavlovian hoops, meant to remold God’s image
into that of some well-functioning
bureaucrat. I chased thoughts
like string on a ball of yarn-
a cerebral umbilicus drawing me
across restricted lines.
Nobody noticed
as long as I towed the line.
Which I could not always do.
Jokes flew off my tongue-
like a skunk’s spray.
Medication is used today,
like trade tariffs,
to level competition,
for students attention.
Freedom is the black hole
we step into, upon liberation
from childhood- armed with a torn map
to the life we should want, but don’t.
Determined to be selected, naturally
I peed on sticks with abandon,
like I had forgotten how babies are made-
Embracing each faint pair of lines
in the bosom of its own possibility
© 2021 Created by Thomas Whitby.
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