from "The Last Class" by Ellen Bryant Voigt:
...leaving the city, leaving our sullen classroom,
I postponed my satchel of your poems
and wondered who I am to teach the young,
having come so far from honest love of the world;
I tried to recall how it felt
to live without grief; and then I wrote down
a few tentative lines...
because of an old compulsion to record,
or sudden resolve not to be self-absorbed
and full of dread --
I wanted to salvage
something from my life, to fix
some truth beyond all change...
