Wednesday, October 3, 2012

A sooty kettle

I have a post in my "in progress" document about how much I love this place and my students and how hard it is going to be to leave when I have to but it is proving hard to write... so for now, there's this.

Today two of my L6 (12 Grade/Juniors) students arrived at the staffroom door holding two pot plants.

I said, "Oh thank you", facetiously, ready to call the Biology teacher for them to hand the pot plants to.

Oops. Turns out one of them was for me.

Last week another teacher and I organised a "Sixth Form Evening: a night of poetry and drama" that included some creative presentations of the texts (drama and poetry) that they are studying. We invited other schools who are studying the same ones and after a week of stress and panic managed to pull off a not-technological-hitch-free but eventually-smoothish evening. I enjoyed it and the girls involved made me so proud with their work, enthusiasm and passion. It was one of the triggers for my how-to-leave-this-place post.

Enter flower pot. Not just any flower in any pot. A purple flower in a sooty kettle. I almost cried. Here's why.


Time's Fool
by Ruth Pitter

Time's fool, but not heaven's: yet hope not for any return.
The rabbit-eaten dry branch and the halfpenny candle
Are lost with the other treasure: the sooty kettle
Thrown away, become redbreast's home in the hedge, where the nettle
Shoots up, and bad bindweed wreathes rust-fretted handle.
Under that broken thing no more shall the dry branch burn.

Poor comfort all comfort: once what the mouse had spared
Was enough, was delight, there where the heart was at home:
The hard cankered apple holed by the wasp and the bird,
The damp bed, with the beetle's tap in the headboard heard,
The dim bit of mirror, three inches of comb:
Dear enough, when with youth and with fancy shared.

I knew that the roots were creeping under the floor,
That the toad was safe in his hole, the poor cat by the fire,
The starling snug in the roof, each slept in his place:
The lily in splendour, the vine in her grace,
The fox in the forest, all had their desire,
As then I had mine, in the place that was happy and poor.



It's one of our poems.

Darn you, students.

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