12 Days Before Christmas Poems

The final two poems I will be posting from Stocking Fillers come from the last ever edition of these festive volumes, the eighteenth. The first, a list-poem sonnet, is one of thirteen celebrating teachers from all subject areas - and thinking of those I worked with - and is more upbeat than previous moods [apart from the light and fluffy]; and the second, a final pastiche, is more rueful than angry, anticipating hopefully as it did - but not actually knowing - that I would be able to leave a job I loved but with which I had become dispirited.  Written December 2009, I left in July 2010.

This first is dedicated to all those wonderful and brilliant English teachers I worked with at my school, in my department, and more broadly still work with in my examining and other educational activities - Merry Christmas 2011,

Christmas English Teachers

Christmas English teachers who career on a seasonal sledge
Christmas English teachers who are as ambiguous as love
Christmas English teachers who know Godot will never
Christmas English teachers who spell Santa with a sibilance of snow
Christmas English teachers who listen to meanings as they change
Christmas English teachers who know an English emporium trades in metaphor
            and error
Christmas English teachers who will travel to nowhere they want to go
Christmas English teachers who hear Carver in the simplicity of everything unsaid
Christmas English teachers who know a line can rise and fall like now
Christmas English teachers who fight philistinism for philosophical fun
Christmas English teachers who write sonnets in the rhythm of sound
Christmas English teachers who know when to let themselves go
Christmas English teachers who understand the chimney inside Santa
Christmas English teachers who are standing out on the edge