September The First Day Of School

My child and I hold hands on the way to school,

And when I leave him at the first-grade

He cries a little but is brave; he

Let go.

My selfish tears remind me howI cried before that door a life ago.

I may have had a hard time letting go.

Each fall the children must endure

What every child also endures alone:

Learning the alphabet, the integers,

Three dozen bits and pieces of a

So arbitrary, so peremptory,

That worlds invisible and

Bow down before it, as in Joseph's

The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed

Before the dreaming of a little boy.

That dream got him such hatred of his

As cost the greater part of life to mend,

And yet great kindness came of it in the end.

IA school is where they grind the grain of thought,

And grind the children who must mind the thought.

It may be those two grindings are but one,

As from the alphabet come Shakespeare's Plays,

As from the integers comes Euler's Law,

As from the whole, inseperably, the lives,

The shrunken lives that have not been set

By law or by poetic phantasy.

But may they be.

My child has

Behind the schoolroom door.

And should I

To see his coming forth, a life away,

I know my hope, but do not know its

Nor hope to know it.

May the fathers he

Among his teachers have a care of

More than his father could.

How that will lookI do not know,

I do not need to know.

Even our tears belong to ritual.

But may great kindness come of it in the end.

Anonymous submission.

Howard Nemerov was born on February 29th, 1920 in New York.

He died of cancer at his home in University City,

Missouri on July 5th 1991.