And our next read a poem called The Elementary School
Classroom In a Slum.
I just want to see if I can read this edition of it
because I keep kept on altering it, but I think I can.
And this was again during the 1930s at the time of the slump
when there were millions of unemployed.
And the BBC, the British Broadcasting Company
had asked me then if I do some talks for elementary schools
let's say schools where there were very poor children.
So I went to see some of these schools.
And in the atmosphere of social hopelessness and so on then,
I wondered whether it was worth teaching children
if they were going to grow up into a society which
couldn't give them any jobs.
And so this is called an elementary school classroom
in a slum.
Far, far from gusty waves, these children's faces.
Like rootless weeds, the hair torn round their pallor.
The tall girl with her way down head,
the paper seeming boy with rats eyes, the stunted unlucky
heir of twisted bones reciting his father's gnarled disease,
his lesson from his desk.
At back of the dim class, one unnoted noted sweet
and the young, his eyes live in a dream of squirrels game
in tree room other than this.
On sour cream walls, donations.
Shakespeare's head cloudless at dawn civilized dome
riding all cities, a belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley,
open handed map awarding the world its world.
And yet for these children, these windows, not this world,
our world where all their futures painted with a fog
a narrow street sealed in with a lead sky far,
far from rivers, capes, and stars of words.
Surely, Shakespeare's wicked, the map
a bad example with ships and sun and love
tempting them to steal for lives that slyly
turn in their cramped holes from fog to endless night.
On their slag heap, these children
wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel
with mended glass like bottle bits on stone.
All of that time and space a foggy slum.
So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.
Unless governor, teacher, inspector, visitor,
this map becomes their window, and these windows
that shut upon their lives like catacombs break or break open
till they break the town and show
the children to green fields and make their world run
Azure on gold sands and let their tongues
run naked into books.
The white and green leaves open history theirs
whose language is the sun.