Tuesday Poem: an earlier version was published by The Paterson Literary Review in 2011

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Milk Time

It was the sacred time: the little cartons

delivered in their plastic crate

by an eighth grade boy

who looked like Gulliver

for a moment, striding through

a cloud of Lilliputian first graders.

A quiet knock, then he’d come in

all hunch-shouldered, quick, and shy,

to set them down next to my desk.

And there they sat, piled in little hills,

like shanties after a cyclone.

How my head spun with the changes

from day to day: This school. No that school.

This classroom that ticks along like a clock,

that one that has no lesson plans, no paper.

This was Paterson, New Jersey.

I was twenty-one: a substitute

who knew nothing about the world

and how it worked.

In one school I nodded

in agreement as the Principal

told me, a red finger nail wagging,

that we must never, never, never

use corporal punishment, no matter

how rude the children might become.

In another I trembled at the Principal’s

booming voice as he hit one of the boys

in front of the class, a trouble maker,

he insisted I identify, and I suddenly

felt so exhausted I let them do whatever

it was they wanted for the rest of the afternoon.

But milk time. Milk time was sacred.

Each one of them carefully opening 

his or her own little house of goodness, 

stepping into a clean white space,

a silence punctuated by an occasional 

bubbling noise, as someone’s straw reached 

into a corner to grab the last few drops.

I didn’t know then that, for many of these

children, this was breakfast. For many of them

ten o’clock rang like an angelus putting an end 

to stomach growls and shaky hands 

that could barely hold a pencil.

All I knew was that at ten o’clock

they sat still. They were quiet, and

they were comforted. I was too.

Sitting at the big desk, in the front of the room, 

I felt like a little girl again, the one 

who stood against the wall in the playground,

watching her classmates ease into smiles 

and whispers, as they filed inside, sat 

at their desks, opened the cartons and savored.

A little girl on the margins, hungry for love.

And here it was: milk time again,

all of us in communion for the time it took,

to swallow that daily ration of decency,

that blessed little half pint that got us through.