Wednesday Sep. 9, 2015

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September, The First Day Of School

I

My child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave; he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind me how
I cried before that door a life ago.
I may have had a hard time letting go.

Each fall the children must endure together
What every child also endures alone:
Learning the alphabet, the integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That worlds invisible and visible

Bow down before it, as in Joseph’s dream
The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down
Before the dreaming of a little boy.
That dream got him such hatred of his brothers
As cost the greater part of life to mend,
And yet great kindness came of it in the end.

II

A school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings are but one,
As from the alphabet come Shakespeare’s Plays,
As from the integers comes Euler’s Law,
As from the whole, inseparably, the lives,

The shrunken lives that have not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.
But may they be. My child has disappeared
Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live
To see his coming forth, a life away,
I know my hope, but do not know its form

Nor hope to know it. May the fathers he finds
Among his teachers have a care of him
More than his father could. How that will look
I do not know, I do not need to know.
Even our tears belong to ritual.
But may great kindness come of it in the end.

"September, The First Day Of School” by Howard Nemerov from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov. © University of Chicago Press, 1981. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

It's the birthday of an early writer of the American Southwest, Mary Hunter Austin (books by this author), born in Carlinville, Illinois (1868). As a nine-year-old girl, she decided to be a writer. She also loved geology — she collected fossils, and at the age of 12, she studied geology in an adult education program for rural Americans. She went to college in Illinois, then moved with her family to California when they set out to homestead there.

She spent most of her life in California, in the desert on the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada. She was fascinated by everything: the geology, the plants and animals, the Native people, the weather, and the intense landscape of the desert. She wrote The Land of Little Rain (1903), a book of sketches about that part of the California desert. She said, "I was only a month writing ... but I spent 12 years peeking and prying before I began it."

The Land of Little Rain was a big success, and Austin wrote many more books — novels, plays, and essays, including The Arrow Maker (1911), Experiences Facing Death (1931), and One-Smoke Stories (1934).

It's the birthday of British novelist James Hilton (books by this author), born in Leigh, Lancashire, England (1900). In the first decade of his writing career, he published more than 10 novels without receiving any attention. Then he wrote Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1934), about an old, beloved schoolmaster whom Hilton based on his father. When the story was published in the United States, it became a huge best-seller. All of his previous novels were reissued and they became best-sellers too. The most popular of the earlier novels was Lost Horizon (1933), about an imaginary Tibetan village called Shangri-La.

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