On any given weekday I am in a class, a workout class. I come for the health benefits; I stay for the teachers. They have coached me through my toughest moments. (So far.)
During the pandemic these teachers first posted videos on Facebook, and when summer came, led us in class outdoors. Yoga has met under a shady grove of mesquite trees, and cycling and rowing have moved to the parking lot. I was there for the very first class back. We all wanted to hug, but settled for waving and smiling big across the six-foot span.
Once upon a time I was a fitness teacher too. Before my kids were born I taught water aerobics, and most of my students were Greatest Generation folks. I taught two days after 9/11, and their general attitude was a determined, “Here we go again.” By the end of that class they’d returned to their favorite topic—dessert recipes for diabetics. That day they taught me more than I taught them.
In one of those early June parking lot classes, the teacher began our warmup by asking, “Tell me something wonderful that’s come out of the pandemic.” She shared how she’s gotten to know a neighbor, an older fella who always sits on his front porch—she used to be too busy to talk to him. Now she stands in the street, and they visit.
Then, one by one, we told our wonderful stories.
Try It
This week write a poem about wise teachers you have known (or wise teachers you have been, if you teach others). The setting can be a classroom or a parking lot—wherever wisdom finds you. What have you learned that you didn’t know you needed to know?
Featured Poem
Thanks to everyone who participated in last week’s poetry prompt. Here’s one from Monica Sharman we enjoyed:
Doomed
“Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”
– G.K. Chesterton
We are doomed
to buoyancy, impossible
for pressures beneath to pull us
down from the clouds
those very pressures being
the upward forces that lift.
Photo by Heather, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Megan Willome.
Browse more poetry prompts
“Megan Willome’s The Joy of Poetry is not a long book, but it took me longer to read than I expected, because I kept stopping to savor poems and passages, to make note of books mentioned, and to compare Willome’s journey into poetry to my own. The book is many things. An unpretentious, funny, and poignant memoir. A defense of poetry, a response to literature that has touched her life, and a manual on how to write poetry. It’s also the story of a daughter who loses her mother to cancer. The author links these things into a narrative much like that of a novel. I loved this book. As soon as I finished, I began reading it again.”
—David Lee Garrison, author of Playing Bach in the D. C. Metro
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Richard Maxson says
Uncle Jack’s Tattoo
There were doors I walked through as a child,
where I learned the depth of water
by its color—the way it holds the sky
against its skin, while the current below
muscles its way through the thickness of gravity.
Your tattoos opened for me the worlds
where you lived—C&O rails, USMC insignia,
an eagle with the world in its talons. You were
rough and crude, and loving. On your right arm,
someone I knew, Mabel, who made sandwiches
we would eat on the docks, in the duck blind,
who smiled at me and spoke with refinement,
with words different, but inclusive of yours.
With every request to explain, a story,
but the anchor and chain behind the world
remained a mystery that time has blued and rusted.
It was a large world you gave me that inclined me
to stay wild, so that my heart slows
among the pied trunks of sycamores,
the brush of pines and seething course of rivers
that keep your memory earthy and wise.
I can’t decide what to write for you—hereafter
spreads before me, like an inkblot full of stars,
ending in a faint line that is neither earth nor sea nor sky.
Megan Willome says
Richard, thank you for your poem.
I also had an Uncle Jack who was “rough and crude, and loving.” He was an Air Commando in Vietnam and a Raven. Here’s to all those we “can’t decide what to write for.”
Rick Maxson says
I think it’s good for a child to have a family with a few “colorful” characters. 🙂 I found it difficult to write about Jack at first, but now I’ve written two poems about him and his tattoos.
I have an even more colorful grandmother and her sister my Aunt Mary. I have yet the words.
Megan Willome says
The words will come.