The Classroom

Covered in our nation's secrets, a flag

with it's blood, woven in like a special thread, 

is stuck in a standstill dance in the corner.

Seven articulated rays of light 

shine through the smudged glass of a lone window.

They push their way past the oppressive blinds

into a somber, four-walled chamber.

Constant artificial hums reach everycorner, plague every ear.

Cool air being pushed through by a hard, off white machine

which terrorizes the stuffy-nosed and tired.

A desk, make from the wood of a tree in a thriving forest, sits underneath a stack of books

whose pages are made from his brother, and a pencil

whose wood carved from his sister.

Twenty-one families in a room 

for twenty young minds and a teacher.

Numbers and words scribbled in flakey white fill the board,

only to be erased with time, as people have been erased

from the minds who sit at the desk that the forgotten once dreamed at.

Year after year nothing changes except the bodies that come and pass;

the flags, sunlight, desks, and thoughts always stay in this room.

My classroom.