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Adam Patric Miller: Last Lesson
teach yourself to sing
you have a song
but not a fish
teach yourself to breathe
you’ll live for a thousand years
but no fish
find a student at a desk
draw a picture of
a crescent moon
find a student in tears
offer a nice cold mandarin orange
teach yourself about
the fight and flight
of a sea robin
(a fish with wings
you told your child-self
it landed, prehistoric,
on a jetty of slippery stones
in Connecticut)
teach yourself
the life line
in the palm of sandy sky
breaking into
tributaries of silvering
minnows
listen for the sound
of yellow chalk dust
sifting onto black wingtips
Mom bought you
when you started teaching
in ‘92 in a city of holes
with its abandoned weapons plant
a vine-wrapped shot tower
crumpled at its top
like the tip of a finger
shot off
teaching will gut you—
but in a nourishing way
like scraping out a cantaloupe
with a big silver spoon—
you will sweeten,
planting the seedy afterbirth
in the compost your wife built
from chicken wire
on the western border of your yard
in Missouri
laugh at yourself
you serious moron
nothing is yours
but the memory
slipping into the memory
of the memory of the last
class you will teach
which, teacher, hasn’t happened
yet. can you remember
how many times
have you taught,
lifting a horseshoe crab
by a bony tail,
eating a Graham cracker
on a soft blue blanket
standing by a telescope
on a flat roof,
solving an equation
on an inner eyelid,
reaching for a fishy phrase
a figure of spectral speech
figuring its way out of your
last lesson
Adam Patric Miller has taught high school for 25 years in three states and currently teaches in St. Louis. He is the author of the book A Greater Monster, a collection of essays selected by Phillip Lopate to win the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize.
Poem copyright 2024 Adam Patric Miller
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you’ve got teaching down.
I taught for 35 years.
I can’t believe how much it taught me.
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Oh yes.
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Here’s a poem I wrote about teaching composition.
My Students and Their Essays
They come to me with papers
on Downs Syndrome, euthanasia,
grandfathers dying of liver cancer,
the stresses that break young people down
and turn them into suicides,
zombies, and alcoholics with no way out
but more booze and more pain
And I smooth the pages,
pat them into neat piles, and say,
“Here, here you need a comma; there
a hyphen, and don’t forget to cite your sources
and correctly alphabetize the works cited.”
But this isn’t what I want to say.
I want to tell them the lies I want to tell myself:
Don’t worry, things will get better, life
turns the corner, diligence and
discipline will save us from death
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Thank you for this, John.
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Wonder what the students in his classes would think if he read them that poem on the last day of school? It was grand as poetry. Would it be a discussion starter or discussion stopper among the high school crowd?
Somedays I think of myself as a serious moron too, but more often before I retired from teaching among the undergrads.
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This poem convinces me even more that I have never been emotionally cut out to be a teacher.
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it’s good you know that, Rose Mary.
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You secondary school teachers are heroes. Period. Bless you no!
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Don’t know where that ‘no’ cane from. Thank you!
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Both touching and zany! Knowing both the rewards and challenges of teaching and the centrality of song, in its many guises, to our lives, I love this poem.
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I do too. The poem is suitably illogical. Like teaching.
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How many of us will nod & nod at that poem. 25 years of teaching — twenty five! Thank you for that — and for the poem.
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I taught for 40 years, mostly undergrad writing classes. I liked the students and loved teaching, but despised the colleges and universities for their cold calculus of spending as little as possible on education.
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I do, so very much, second that, friend…
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As a former teacher from k-college ( I think I missed 3rd grade) I found myself saying “yes, yes, oh yes”
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