Blackboard

Blackboard

A puff of white hit the smoke slate blackboard

and I wondered if I’d ever get it clean with this.

This chalk stained eraser raced the last words written

into lumps of dust just pushed into the haze

and I was getting nowhere. Why would we

still use this archaic method?

Too often, I’ve broken my eardrums,

chalk sticks, clean hands, hungmens necks

and failed to completely erase the evidence.

But sometimes I wonder again what the inability

to complete a cleaning might reveal,

if chalkography was a science,

the art of interpreting academic layers

on blackboards.

And what would we find under hundreds of layers of

Sunday school classes and presidency meetings,

Primary play-groups and cub scouts.

Maybe behind Wednesday’s “Kim and Kate and

Sal, Kylee, Jen, Josie, Chriss and Kaitlin were here’s”

and a few layers of hangman

and hangman, merit badge classes, toddler scribbles

definitions, object lessons, and tic tac toe,

acronyms, and cartoonish murals, charts and diagrams,

the pride cycle, book titles, today’s readings, homework assignments

that will never be followed up on, names we prayed on,

some we fasted, plans we agreed on, some that lasted,

behind hangman, and hangman, and hangman, and the longer-lasting hang-woman,

complete with a skirt, blouse, eyes, ears, mouth, and nose,

behind the lyrics to “head shoulders knees and toes,”

and several scriptures carefully written beside five carefully positioned circles,

behind some ancient Hebrew and some Greek,

behind the teaching of etiquette to young men

and the memorizing of the Young Women’s theme and motto,

behind quotes from the manual and did I mention hangman?

behind a million words and even more strangled stick figures,

maybe as the chalk hit the blackboard, something clicked in the mind

of a young man or woman that this is real,

that this is true,

that this is how.

And here I am pushing around the soot of it like it’s a burden.