<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=410452" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>September, The First Day Of School</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I</div><div style="margin:10px 0">My child and I hold hands on the way to school,<br>And when I leave him at the first-grade door<br>He cries a little but is brave; he does<br>Let go. My selfish tears remind me how<br>I cried before that door a life ago.<br>I may have had a hard time letting go.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Each fall the children must endure together<br>What every child also endures alone:<br>Learning the alphabet, the integers,<br>Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff<br>So arbitrary, so peremptory,<br>That worlds invisible and visible</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Bow down before it, as in Joseph's dream<br>The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down<br>Before the dreaming of a little boy.<br>That dream got him such hatred of his brothers<br>As cost the greater part of life to mend,<br>And yet great kindness came of it in the end.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">II</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A school is where they grind the grain of thought,<br>And grind the children who must mind the thought.<br>It may be those two grindings are but one,<br>As from the alphabet come Shakespeare's Plays,<br>As from the integers comes Euler's Law,<br>As from the whole, inseperably, the lives,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The shrunken lives that have not been set free<br>By law or by poetic phantasy.<br>But may they be. My child has disappeared<br>Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live<br>To see his coming forth, a life away,<br>I know my hope, but do not know its form</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Nor hope to know it. May the fathers he finds<br>Among his teachers have a care of him<br>More than his father could. How that will look<br>I do not know, I do not need to know.<br>Even our tears belong to ritual.<br>But may great kindness come of it in the end.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>Anonymous submission.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Howard+Nemerov">Howard Nemerov</a><div class=q> <img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share"> <script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=410452" data-title="September, The First Day Of School de Howard Nemerov" data-description="I My child and I hold hands on the way to school, And when I leave him at the first-grade door He cries a little but is brave; he does Let go. My selfish tears remind me how I cried before that door a life ago. I may have had a hard time letting ..."></div> </div> </div>

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