Legacy

 - for my students

Beginning a new semester
once again I encounter
bright, thoughtless faces
staring at me as if
I were a curious, irrelevant
antiquity from a museum
they don't wish to visit.
The earth is fresh to them
and they are unbruised,
for a little while yet,
by the unforgiving realities
that life must provide.
I shuffle papers and make
solemn pronouncements
about the beauty of learning.
They yawn and fondle
the ubiquitous cell-phones
I have so cruelly
ordered turned off.
I no longer envy them
their youth or their future.
They remind me of pigeons
ready to be plucked.
I am tempted to tell them
the  necessary brutal truths:
half their marriages
will end in anger and divorce,
others will drag on in despair;
there is no such thing
as true love forever and ever;
the jobs they dream of will
mostly be empty and boring
and obsolete in short order;
the corporations and the usurers
have already captured the world;
that the earth is poisoned
and dying a slow, certain death;
how there are no more secrets
and the government may now legally
read their texts and emails,
listen to their conversations
and learn down to the last moan
even how and with whom
they make love;
that there will be more
than just rumors of war
and they will have to pay for them
in blood, loss and treasure;
that God is otherwise occupied
crushing children in Haiti;
that we have utterly failed them.
But I don't, of course.
They wouldn't hear me if I tried.
Bloody, weeping holocaust
that it has always been,
the world must be rediscovered
by every shiny, new generation.
Mentally wishing them luck,
I do my job, stick to the syllabus,
say a prayer for their possibilities,
turn it all over to them, smile,
and continue to pretend.
  - mce