Hey everyone,
If you know me, you know that I love being a teacher because I love working with kids and learning with them. It is a tiring and heartbreaking and frustrating and beautiful job, which I wouldn’t change for the world.
My students this year have gone through so much. They have worked so hard, in spite of being locked down and shut away, in spite of their parents losing their jobs, and in spite of the constant, overriding fear that COVID-19 has brought to them. More than ever, I am proud of this cohort of kids for making it through the year, and still managing to have smiles on their faces whenever they walk into my classroom.
I couldn’t be luckier to teach these kids.
So I wrote a poem for them in the place of a message that I would normally send to have put in their Yearbook.
It’s a message of hope and courage in uncertain times, written in my favourite form of all – the Villanelle (it’s also in iambic tetrameter for those keeping score).
This isn’t just for one kid, one class, one grade, one school, one state, or one country. It’s for all those kids who are leaving school this year into a world that’s on its head. You’ve done your best. You’re wonderful. You’ll do great things.
Enjoy.
The End
A Villanelle for Year 12, 2020
But now, at last, it’s time to send
into that great unknown, to you,
the message that it’s not the end
of all your learning, all your friends,
and any chances that are new.
But now, at last, it’s time to send
you on your way. They’re twists and bends,
the trials that you’ll make it through –
the message that it’s not the end,
and with some time, some hearts will mend,
but you’ll be you; and you’ll be true.
But now, at last, it’s time to send
a great fanfare into the skies, lend
your souls some courage as you flew
the message that it’s not the end
so far away rules cannot bend.
For then you’ll see the truest view:
that now, at last, it’s time to send
the message that it’s not the end.
Poetry and Prose 