Erasers

As punishment, my father said, the nuns

   would send him and the others

out to the schoolyard with the day’s erasers.

 

Punishment?  The pounding symphony

   of padded cymbals clapped

together at arm’s length overhead

 

(a snow of vanished alphabets and numbers

   powdering their noses

until they sneezed and laughed out loud at last)

 

was more than remedy, it was reward

   for all the hours they’d sat

without a word (except for passing notes)

 

and straight (or near enough) in front of starched

   black-and-white Sister Martha,

like a conductor raising high her chalk

 

baton, the only one who got to talk.

   Whatever did she teach them?

And what became of all those other boys,

 

poor sinners, who had made a joyful noise?

   My father likes to think,

at seventy-five, not of the white-on-black

 

chalkboard from whose crumbled negative

   those days were never printed,

but of word-clouds where unrecorded voices

 

gladly forgot themselves.  And that he still

   can say so, though all the lessons,

most of the names, and (he doesn’t spell

 

this out) it must be half the boys themselves,

   who grew up and dispersed

as soldiers, fathers, husbands, now are dust.

Mary Jo Salter, Open Shutters (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003)