It’s been a school year. All 55 days of it. I keep telling myself I’m growing as a teacher. I’m learning a lot. I tell myself that on repeat. (There’s some other looping self-talk going on, too, but I’m not going to share that right now.)

Trying to be proactive, I’ve been adding things to my weeknight schedule, deliberately creating some time out of the vortex of school. I noticed an upcoming event at the Portland Museum of Art and planned to attend, registering for a free one hour ekphrastic poetry class.

I called my daughter, Lydia, and asked if she wanted to meet for dinner and go to the museum beforehand. My husband opted to join us, and I looked forward to the event all week. A little breathing room.

Then I had one of the worst teaching days of my life. Enough said. I was desperate to escape into an evening out; however, by the end of that “terrible, horrible, no good very bad day”, I had no bandwidth for participating in a class. None. The idea of listening to someone talk about, well, anything, and then putting myself out there with some strangers was, in that moment, horrifying. It wasn’t an option.

So, after dinner, we walked over to the museum. I touched base with the volunteer at the desk to free up my space in the class in case someone else wanted to join. I, then, breathed a huge sigh of relief.

While Kurt wandered, Lydia and I decided to check out the erasure poetry center set up in the museum’s Great Hall. They had supplied printed pages and pencils. We reached through the crowded area to the materials, randomly selecting a page each, then settled in to create our poems. Here’s what I came up with:

When A Country Discards Empathy

no hint of human
empty
still and silent
distance visible
dissolving fidelity

©Molly Hogan

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Janice Scully at her blog, Salt City Verse.