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Erasers
As punishment, my father said, the nuns
would send him and the others
out to the schoolyard with the day’s erasers.
Punishment? The pounding symphony
of padded cymbals clapped
together at arm’s length overhead
(a snow of vanished alphabets and numbers
powdering their noses
until they sneezed and laughed out loud at last)
was more than remedy, it was reward
for all the hours they’d sat
without a word (except for passing notes)
and straight (or near enough) in front of starched
black-and-white Sister Martha,
like a conductor raising high her chalk
baton, the only one who got to talk.
Whatever did she teach them?
And what became of all those other boys,
poor sinners, who had made a joyful noise?
My father likes to think,
at seventy-five, not of the white-on-black
chalkboard from whose crumbled negative
those days were never printed,
but of word-clouds where unrecorded voices
gladly forgot themselves. And that he still
can say so, though all the lessons,
most of the names, and (he doesn’t spell
this out) it must be half the boys themselves,
who grew up and dispersed
as soldiers, fathers, husbands, now are dust.
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Mary Jo Salter is the author of eight books of poems, most recently The Surveyors (2017) and Nothing by Design (2013). Her new collection, Zoom Rooms, will appear in 2022. She has also been a co-editor of three editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.(Click here for more poems by and information on Mary Jo Salter.)
[“Erasures” copyright Mary Jo Salter; from Open Shutters, Alfred A. Knopf, 2003]
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