A poem for semester's end: The exam in question

For semester’s end, an exam
By Brother Rob Peach, F.S.C.

1.

My little brothers

Many of whom are bigger

And brighter

Than I will ever

Be

I know in anxious turns of

Stomach

You wait for what is

To constitute

The impending doom

Wrought

By clever, semester end

Questioning…

(But have no fear)

To me

You will salute

In letter form

That with blue booked-beginnings

Starts as follows…

2.

“Dear Brother Peach

You ask what I have learned

Well

This is what I tell you

With open notes

On index card

before me…

A number of things

Of which I speak

With ease

Lest I failed to listen with

Perspicacity

As you spoke sometimes

In thoughtlessness

Yet

With the ‘humble’ intent

To expand our

Consciousness, collective—

Even if you made

No sense

I give you what I have to offer

My own experience”

3.

So proffer me

My brothers

With your best

Insight

Tell me what you understand

Or what in flight

Comes to you

From the pages of the

Text—that body

Of breathing words

The musings of

A distant mind

That western hemisphere

A faraway land

Of imagination

Write as you would

A brother

Who from you

Is somehow

Far removed

From your lived

Experience

Am I

After all

Not that?

Which is to say

Not you?

I cannot decide your

Meaning

For you

Let the text do that

Instead

As you two meet in

Dialogue

4.

Speak to me of

Experience

That has taught you what

You know

When though an

Open door

You walked

With the energy of a

September sunrise

Perhaps you were afraid

Then

And maybe

You still

Are

On these shuddering morns of

Winter

When with that cold

Us it does embrace

5.

So

In the ticking of that turning

Feeling’s hour

Fill a page to its edges

As though approaching

A blue-lined precipice

(With a pen as your walking staff)

Your thoughts

They will surly spill

As your pens stride

Just to drop

To their honorable

Deaths

6.

Tell me

Please

With the same force that wills

You move

Why it is

That we have reason to walk

(which is to say, “to write”)

At all

Is it a pecuniary measure?

A force of word

For which we are paid

In penny

As Poe was

(If you will recall)

Put that vocab

You have learned

By rote

To use in dialogue

With an audience that

Seeks to see

Your voice

Young and impetuous

Though

It is

But even still

Maturing

And not

To be

Forgotten

7.

Can you do that for

You?

With references

Indubitably

To authors and their lives

Remember

That they

Like you

Have hearts that beat

In blue

They too breathed

This air

(We share)

That turns our

Struggle

To a flaming hue

“Spill over, spill over”

This page does command us

“Upon the blankest page”

And take the time

To give

What only

Grows with age

That defining

Character

Of the oldest sage

8.

Patience

My brothers

And the calm of

Wisdom

You realize more than

You have

Forgotten

Sift through the ancient

Daze

When there was a clearing in the forest

For log cabins

And their sylvan hermits

Who did live

Deliberately sucking

The bones of this life

Dry

Why

Did a man

Or a woman

Who chose to live

Alone

Feel the need

To speak in

Verse?

Or why write

About so common an occurrence

As crossing the Brooklyn Ferry

Lying in the grass

Or listening to the mass at work

In cities of such loud

Clanging?

Why a play about made up witches

In an era when America

Is on the hunt?

9.

If philosophy is but a

Circle

(That never finds an end)

Why make moot

Points

In ink

About those Things

In Nature We

Can and cannot

See?

10.

On the front of battle

Fire burns in blood

At the site of which

Most of us

Would faint?

Why speak of such

Hellish things

That men create

Yet

Just as soon

Avoid?

Are you that youth

Who in impish

Desire melts

When life flashes

Its crimson flood upon

You?

Or are you that feathered thing?

(Though of this kind

There are two)

Are you the

One

That does not in despairing

Fall

But

Sings

With an amber voice of

Hope?

And wings that beat

In the solid whiteness of flight

Louder than

The dark din of war

Rumbling in the fog below

On the insane battleground of waltzing

Eternity?

11.

Why should you personify

That tree

Which never moves?

Or invert yourself

To the form of a silent, dumb

Dog

That flees across—

In the liberated light of night—

The escaping

Meadow of the moon?

Why express—

In the misty words of

A fictional lunatic’s mute appraisal—

The asylum site

Of a neighborhood cut

Into cell blocks

Like cookies baked

In society and laced with the freshest

Hallucinogens

12.

A man presses his

Fist against

A wrathful paper of prose

When it could

Raised in air

Pack a harder punch

Think now of

Rage

He did thus raise his

Five fingers clenched

While standing and staged

Before an empire of evil

And did with untamed

Screaming in lyrics loud from there

Against land scathed by hypocrisy

But restored in texture

With the flat surface of a page

Would you do the same?

13.

We speak of fear and paranoia

As thought a bloody heart buried

Beneath floor boards

We speak of love

Lost

In the intrusive squawk of a devilish crow

Named, “Nevermore”

We speak of love

As grand as she

Who launched ships innumerable—

Even across the waters

Of gothic man

Who has not forgotten Helen or

Annabel Lee

14.

What of that good man

Whose story seems better said

Around campfires buried deep in

Faithless woods

At once deforested and reforested

In the timeless, written will

Of human memory

A history

Survived in guilty violence by

Us

Who came of sin—

That great unTruth—

Disguised

As serpent fruit

15.

How might in writing we

Learn from our transgressions made

In the canon of the past?

Brothers

This I (at long) last ask you…

How does our earthen-vesseled time

Encapsulated in those sacred myths of man

Facts stored in fiction’s psalms

Dancing in literary movements

Renew itself

By the omnipotence

Of Nature’s thought ubiquitous

Transcribed?