A Teacher's Holiday

As you are packing your cases
and wishing for nicer sunglasses,
the primary school teachers are boarding
the flights of their stairs and fastening the

seatbelts of their office doors
- typically a neglected bedroom with
a cheap desk and a floral roller-blind.
And there they will sit amid the damp laundry,

used coffee cups and unopened junk mail,
trying to create a gourmet feast from just some
broken bits of egg shell and a rusty colander.
The commanders and generals, hidden deep

inside their bunkers, have set the objectives,
decided the targets at which these infantrymen will strike.
And then with no thought as to how all this
will be implemented on the ground,

without so much as single shell of ammunition,
these men and women are booted unceremoniously
from the tail cone of the airplane
to faithfully do their duty. To blindly soldier on.

While you rinse the beads of sweat
from your sun bronzing skin in the pool,
the teacher sits under the glare of a sixty watt lamp,
doggedly trying to spin silk from straw

to tell the wood from the trees.
They also say you cannot make a silk purse from a sow’s ear,
and that you simply cannot juggle soot.
Yet this is what the primary teacher does,

one week in every eight, six times a year.
Holed away in their dimly lit little rooms,
listening to your footfalls beneath the window.

You on your way to do whatever is it is you do
on all those evenings off.