WEBVTT

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And our next read a poem
called The Elementary School

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Classroom In a Slum.

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I just want to see if I
can read this edition of it

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because I keep kept on
altering it, but I think I can.

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And this was again during the
1930s at the time of the slump

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when there were
millions of unemployed.

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And the BBC, the British
Broadcasting Company

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had asked me then if I do some
talks for elementary schools

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let's say schools where there
were very poor children.

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So I went to see some
of these schools.

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And in the atmosphere of social
hopelessness and so on then,

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I wondered whether it was
worth teaching children

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if they were going to grow
up into a society which

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couldn't give them any jobs.

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And so this is called an
elementary school classroom

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in a slum.

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Far, far from gusty waves,
these children's faces.

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Like rootless weeds, the
hair torn round their pallor.

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The tall girl with
her way down head,

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the paper seeming boy with
rats eyes, the stunted unlucky

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heir of twisted bones reciting
his father's gnarled disease,

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his lesson from his desk.

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At back of the dim class,
one unnoted noted sweet

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and the young, his eyes live
in a dream of squirrels game

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in tree room other than this.

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On sour cream walls, donations.

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Shakespeare's head cloudless
at dawn civilized dome

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riding all cities, a belled,
flowery, Tyrolese valley,

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open handed map awarding
the world its world.

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And yet for these children,
these windows, not this world,

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our world where all their
futures painted with a fog

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a narrow street sealed
in with a lead sky far,

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far from rivers, capes,
and stars of words.

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Surely, Shakespeare's
wicked, the map

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a bad example with
ships and sun and love

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tempting them to steal
for lives that slyly

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turn in their cramped holes
from fog to endless night.

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On their slag heap,
these children

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wear skins peeped through by
bones and spectacles of steel

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with mended glass like
bottle bits on stone.

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All of that time and
space a foggy slum.

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So blot their maps with
slums as big as doom.

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Unless governor, teacher,
inspector, visitor,

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this map becomes their
window, and these windows

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that shut upon their lives like
catacombs break or break open

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till they break
the town and show

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the children to green fields
and make their world run

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Azure on gold sands
and let their tongues

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run naked into books.

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The white and green
leaves open history theirs

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whose language is the sun.

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