I think most of us at some time during our early years have had a teacher that has inspired us. That special person embedded in our memory bank that stood out as encouraging and real. Someone who went that one step further to make us want to learn.
A friend told me the story of such a person. A brilliant math teacher who later developed Alzheimer's and was known to 'wander away' from home and get into some odd predicaments. She later had to be placed in a care home. This poem that is influenced from my friends memory can't help but be tinged with sadness. Or is it?
DIVISION
Miss Betsy Love spends all her time
in the lower pasture
she squats to pee by the sun drenched stump
of a rotting oak
mice tickle her toes
scamper under her skirt and chuckle
she dips ripe berries in the crested brook
sucks fresh fallen fruit
smiles that rusted smile of happiness
Miss Betsy Love no longer trusts the numbers
old chalk dust memories
circle her mornings like spiders
so she measures her days and the pressure of
water
at Gorman falls
the slant of the sun in late August
she lies herself down in the afternoon rain
to study the bellies of sheep
and the earth
like the bottom of and old wooden bucket
Miss Betsy Love can't do the math
if you take one life and divide it up
she comes up with a number hard to believe
as she claws through the brush and speaks to
the wind
the wind
the blood on her skin becomes crusted and dry
and she knows that somewhere
people are counting
counting her days
poem by annie
