I am singing my fear of my students,
the cascade failure of mislaid emails,
of earnest young writers who drop words through the roof of a three story cabin
and then wait, ears pinned to the air.
It will take an entire semester for language falling the distance,
piling high enough on throw rugs, on hardwood,
to reach listeners this keen.
My students need a teacher guide whose astrological sign isn’t Gemini.
They need a Boeing 787 aircraft with battery operated beacon lights that work.
They need terrorist proof sneakers.
They need Suni and Shiite neighborhoods where no one explodes car bombs during rush hour.
They need cell phone genes at conception,
umbilical Blue Tooth,
Facebook icon tattoos
Google cars that drive themselves.
I back from the lectern shimmering like a heat wave,
glad for heat waves
for spinning dust moats
and dervish thoughts.
During office hours,
I’m a conch shell,
resonating their unencumbered words.
It’s what I can be for them:
delineation,
a sign marking the trail head.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Glass’s poetry has appeared in The Broad River Review, Our Last Walk : Using Poetry for Grieving and Remembering our Pets, and The Snowy Egret Journal. She has two poems forthcoming in the anthology Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, to be released on October 1 of this year. Her chapbook Listening Blind to a Bewick’s Wren, is scheduled for publication by Slate Roof Press in 2020. A retired English professor, she now lives and writes from her home in Saratoga California, which she shares with her husband John, her working guide dog Omni, and her retired guide Zeus.