Mike Veve

Poetry Lesson                     

I tell my middle school students,
6th and 7th graders,
to do as I have been told to do:
Write poems composed of images
grounded in the senses,
so we will all see what you see
so we will all feel what you feel.

Even still, some students say 
that they can’t get started,
that the blank page is not the snow day I promised,
that it’s just another frozen tongue
 of numbed ideas that will not speak.

If this is the case, I tell them, take a picture and
tell me in words all you see inside it.
Show us the beauty you see in words.
See if you can make us feel it.
The poem is due after the holiday break.

Rochelle’s mom, brittle veined and
spread across a hospice bed like a formaldehyde butterfly
dies of AIDS on Christmas Eve.
So many of her classmates return to school in January
with photos from their country houses, 
speak to me in poetry
of gently sledded snow hills and
corn-rowed scalp burns in Caribbean resorts.

Rochelle hangs back from my desk until lunch,
waiting to share her poem,
waiting to show her photo.

It is not of an abscess of turned earth for the coffin
choked with terminal lilies,
or a cipher of Bronx mourners huddled in hoods against the rawness.

Rochelle’s photo is of a crimson solar upsurge
slapping against the clouds and sky
as a funeral sunset fought not to happen.

She wrote, look how beautiful it was out,
on the worst day of my life.
Can you feel it?

A former dishwasher, line cook, and chef in Western Massachusetts, Mike Veve moved to New York City in 2002 to become a public school teacher. He worked for one year at MS 245/The Computer School before becoming a poetry, theater, social studies, special education, science, sex ed, and literature teacher at MS 243/The Center School. Mike’s work has appeared in Jabberwocky, The Massachusetts Review, the poetry anthology El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry, and the crime story anthology, Down to the River. He is a Fellow of New York City’s Academy for Teachers, and in 2018 was the recipient of a Blackboard Award for Excellence in Education.