alexpgp | What was lost has been found...

Back during my senior year in high school, our English teacher was what was known in the business as a "permanent substitute." Mrs. Maney, which was her name, was teaching the class of the department's chairman, who was on sabbatical.

I was technically inclined in those days, albeit naively so. I thought, for example, that good grades and acing the Regents exam in physics somehow made me "good" at physics (a notion I was quickly disabused of about two weeks into freshman year in college). English I tolerated only because there was no way around it, although it wasn't as if I experienced any particular difficulty in the subject.

Still, Mrs. Maney - who limped around on a cane because she was on a long-term mend from a near-fatal car accident - managed to make stuff like "the Italian sonnet" interesting enough for me to take a crack at writing one, and she said nice things about it.

I remembered the vague outlines of what happened that year, but none of the specifics - such as my teacher's name or even the subject of the poem - until I ran across a yellowed piece of paper an hour or two ago that, frankly, was this close to being thrown out.

Anyway, what follows is the kind of stuff that got a "98" from Mrs. Maney back in the day:

Realization

The smell of rotting leaves offends one so,
Their sharp, contrasting colors blind one's eyes,
So high above the trees flies south the crow,
Flies south to some forsaken paradise.
'Tis autumn, all grows still, all fades, all dies.
One asks within oneself: "Dear God, why now?"
"Why take away this now?" And then one sighs...
And life seems dull... Then creases one one's brow.
"These leaves will help the farmer use his plow,
'Twill fertilize the soil; 'twill help the crop.
The birds, down south (I guess) are needed now.
It's just a temporary close of shop!"
And in addition, one can say this thing --
"Well, fall is but a harbinger of spring!"

Cheers...