Theme for Mr. B.

Mr. Burns was an earnest man whose emotions read clearly like prose from a fifth grade reader.  Our first day he wore a tweed checkered jacket and black leather shoes that made little sound on the linoleum floor.  After arranging our desks in an oval, he circled reading Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B”:

Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you---
Then, it will be true

And I did go home that night and write a page, though whether it was simple or true or came out of me I do not recall.  I disliked poetry, and “Bessie, bop or Bach,” as well, and at thirteen invested more time in what came naturally than what felt extracted. 

                The second day, I expected to write prose but Mr. Burns assigned yet more poetry.  In fact, the poems continued for two weeks.  We read Tennyson, Yeats and Blake and wrote A,B,A,B, A,B,B,A and A,A,B,B, but never A,B,C,D, unless it was free verse, which was frowned upon.  All was foreign stanzas and exalting rhyme.  The homegrown essays of Twain, Thoreau and Emerson were alien, and it seemed that Hughes alone was allowed to cross the border.

The third week Mr. Burns asked us to write a story, in prose.  Relieved of rhyming schemes, I quickly jotted the beginnings of an adventure yarn on lined paper.  However, I was interrupted.

“Please pass your papers to the right,” Mr. Burns intoned.  I paused, and held my paper possessively. “Please pass your papers to the right,” Mr. Burns repeated, “and continue the new story where the previous person left off.”  I drummed a pencil on the table and the corners of my mouth tightened.  No sooner had my individual voice found release than it was to become a part of someone else’s. 

Dutifully, I passed my swashbuckler right and looked askance at the inchoate lines I received from the left.  I do not remember what was written there and it did not matter.  Below, I wrote what came naturally:

once there was a boy named Gray

who was forced to write poetry all day

poetry, poetry and nothing else

perhaps he’ll go home and shoot himself.

I placed my pencil calmly on the table and passed this masterpiece to the right.  Each of my classmates would now, in turn, read this subversive attack against the man and for the next thirty minutes I marked the progress of my missive as it traveled around the room. 

Twenty minutes before the bell, Mr. Burns finished grading papers and pulled a chair into the circle.  He then produced a fountain pen from his breast pocket and began to mark the stories that came his way.  My hand clutched the pencil and began to drum rapidly as my eyes shifted along the arc of desks.  The poem was passed seven times and there were twelve desks between Mr. Burns and I, so five passes remained.  I thought myself safe but with each minute the hands of the clock appeared to slow.  Two minutes before the bell we passed our stories a final time.

“Who wrote this?” Mr. Burns asked, his tweed stiffening.  No one spoke.  He rose and entered the circle, waving the piece of enemy propaganda over his head.  “Who wrote this?” he said again as he circled like a prosecutor before a jury box.  “Who wrote these lines?”  And he began to quote the poem:

Once there was a boy named Grey…

The defendant jurors peered at their desks, but stayed silent.  Mr. Burns circled a few more times and then, unable to elicit a confession, made a bee-line for his desk, his leather shoes percussive on the linoleum. 

I have never thought my poem a success, though it was true at my age.  And though that truth challenged assumptions, evoked strong feelings and subverted the status quo, something was missing.  It was subversive, but no change resulted, and evoked strong feelings, but only fear and anger.  It contained truth, but petty, small truth. 

I learned nothing from my teacher

and he nothing from me,

though he was earnest, loved poems,

and was somewhat more free. 

This is my page for Mr. B.