Details |
Anita Dozier Poem
If out of darkness comes light, then my life must be one ginormous ray of sunshine right about now. Coming out of a 14-year classroom coma, I am now awake, yet I continue to slumber afraid to take the sleep mask off. Like a blanket being taken from my eyes, I can now see, yet using my eyes to peer through the darkness searching for that one ray of light produces pain much like the pain of stepping from a movie theater out into the bright parking lot blinded by sudden light. As cliché as that sounds, mine eyes have seen the coming of the light of my life, but will I pay for causing you all slow deaths? Through institutional darkness, one lone beam of light has emerged through the blanket of the forest with fauna so thick I can barely wield my machete to dent that dense thicket of poisonous shrubbery. Can I now see the darkness for the trees? Can it be? Am I really still alive? Did I have a hand at killing you all? After all these years crawling around in a black hole of the urban school setting, can I really be allowed to awaken to think for myself no longer perpetuating the status quo of public school bureaucracy? A single pinhole of a sun’s ray shines down on me through the crack in the eastward facing window, warming my crown that perches on the top of my head. I wear that crown like the queen who smiles below to her servants. Do I choose to serve the public any longer now that I realize my sentence is your sentence? Do I choose to report to the encompassing ebony of the sterile school for assorted abuse? Where there was a comforting death every 5:30 a.m., I arose to face my sentence in the sanitarium of the public school. Do I respect myself for exposing you to such darkness? No wonder you little people show no respect to your teachers. Should I expect respect from others after what I have done for the teaching machine? The system smothered me as I sank deeper into the abyss of the education system, yet I sucked the life out of you, too, children. Closing in around me, my soul was crushed by the force of stifling children from seeing the light. What is this freedom I now experience? Is this real? Am I dreaming? That alarm sounds no more, but that shrieking sound alerts me of danger as it still haunts me in my daytime hours where I pine for you all. There is danger in stumbling through darkness just as there is danger in revealing light. To be blinded no more, I feel my way to safety groping along a thick patch of freedom. From the pen on my resignation letter, I signed my career away to light and to life, though my guilt remains, as I am guilty of stamping out the light of children’s creativity for so long. There will be a price to pay, for this royalty reins no more. I no longer lord over small children in the classroom acting as a programmed machine of their minds. Wake up, children. Report to school like the good little soldiers you are to represent my kingdom of darkness, for it is time to lower the veil over your eyes. Sit in your assigned seat. Now, let me read you a bedtime story so that you pick up your number two pencils to write your tales following the prompt of being lost in the woods alone with your nightmares of light. I will guide you no more. You will serve me no more. Children, good night.
Copyright © Anita Dozier | Year Posted 2016
|