For An Unnamed Teacher

You know that shot, in films and musicals glamorising La Révolution Francaise: a hundred metres away, just fitting into the camera’s breadth of range, a crowd which signifies rights withheld advances on you (safe in bourgeois seat…) , led by a token handsome, flushed, tall kerchiefed man or woman, centre-stage? Today, that’s me – in upraised hand, a Bill of Poets’ Rights… You said, I’m told, that ‘if you were a poet, you would just write praise…’ Do I detect a note of implied criticism there? … Did you not know, that every word that poets write is praise? First, praise of the language that we use – its glorious flexibility; praise of the chance to use it at its height and breadth and depth, freshly - as if it had never put before this word with that, and made of it new thought to lodge within your mind, and warm your heart, to call from soul to soul, of what souls share… Advancing on the camera, we shout, if you don’t know this - that all that, is praise… then you’re not ready for reading poetry, just yet… ‘For this we stand; for this we live; for this we’ll die’… The photo-opportunity has come and gone; the cameramen push back, drive to their editors; the crowd disperses, glowing with its righteousness; and leaves the world to darkness, and TV…