Schoolville

Schoolville

I'm going to try and do thins blog a little different and try to make it more... me.

Schoolsville - Billy Collins

Glancing over my shoulder at the past,
I realize the number of students I have taught
is enough to populate a small town.

I can see it nestled in a paper landscape,
chalk dust flurrying down in winter,
nights dark as a blackboard.

The population ages but never graduates.
On hot afternoons they sweat the final in the park
and when it's cold they shiver around stoves
reading disorganized essays out loud.
A bell rings on the hour and everybody zigzags
into the streets with their books.

I forgot all their last names first and their
first names last in alphabetical order.
But the boy who always had his hand up
is an alderman and owns the haberdashery.
The girl who signed her papers in lipstick
leans against the drugstore, smoking,
brushing her hair like a machine.

Their grades are sewn into their clothes
like references to Hawthorne.
The A's stroll along with other A's.
The D's honk whenever they pass another D.

All the creative-writing students recline
on the courthouse lawn and play the lute.
Wherever they go, they form a big circle.

Needless to say, I am the mayor.
I live in the white colonial at Maple and Main.
I rarely leave the house. The car deflates
in the driveway. Vines twirl around the porch swing.






I highlighted a few key words that stood out to me and I'm going to try to explain what i think this poem means to me.

Taught- past tence teach, he was a teacher, but I think that the is still teaching I think we all teach diffrent things in different ways we never stop teaching and we always leave an impression on someone weather it is good or bad.

Never graduates- I think this phase means that you never quit learning, you learn something new everyday so in away no one ever graduates.

Mayor- He is talking about himself he is both of these, he is a teacher teaching as he lives but also a learner learning something new everyday so it refers to him over the other people doing the same as he is doing they have just not been doing it at long.