His hands ring in the upper classes.
There, in the morning light, his will
Is forged, bent, as truth, on ruling  
This place, underhand, underfoot.

With shuttered ears divining his voice
The dim pupils see only what is said.
The top hand schools, topples all words
Ringing hands sing the song of fools.

How Headmaster trains on the heel,  
A dagger strikes, the paper cuts
Exalted, his close minded hands,  
See a Czar in the stony swagger,

And the student body, submissively lies
With his feet.  Outside the college
The headmaster is heard. Grossly,
He is their dream and only shepherd.

His hands ring in the upper classes.
There, in the morning light, his will
Is forged, bent, as truth, on ruling  
This place, underhand, underfoot.

With shuttered ears divining his voice
The dim pupils see only what is said.
The top hand schools, topples all words
Ringing hands sing the song of fools.

How Headmaster trains on the heel,  
A dagger strikes, the paper cuts
Exalted, his close minded hands,  
See a Czar in the stony swagger,

And the student body, submissively lies
With his feet.  Outside the college
The headmaster is heard. Grossly,
He is their dream and only shepherd.

His hands ring in the upper classes.
There, in the morning light, his will
Is forged, bent, as truth, on ruling  
This place, underhand, underfoot.

With shuttered ears divining his voice
The dim pupils see only what is said.
The top hand schools, topples all words
Ringing hands sing the song of fools.

How Headmaster trains on the heel,  
A dagger strikes, the paper cuts
Exalted, his close minded hands,  
See a Czar in the stony swagger,

And the student body, submissively lies
With his feet.  Outside the college
The headmaster is heard. Grossly,
He is their dream and only shepherd.

His hands ring in the upper classes.
There, in the morning light, his will
Is forged, bent, as truth, on ruling  
This place, underhand, underfoot.

With shuttered ears divining his voice
The dim pupils see only what is said.
The top hand schools, topples all words
Ringing hands sing the song of fools.

How Headmaster trains on the heel,  
A dagger strikes, the paper cuts
Exalted, his close minded hands,  
See a Czar in the stony swagger,

And the student body, submissively lies
With his feet.  Outside the college
The headmaster is heard. Grossly,
He is their dream and only shepherd.

His hands ring in the upper classes.
There, in the morning light, his will
Is forged, bent, as truth, on ruling  
This place, underhand, underfoot.

With shuttered ears divining his voice
The dim pupils see only what is said.
The top hand schools, topples all words
Ringing hands sing the song of fools.

How Headmaster trains on the heel,  
A dagger strikes, the paper cuts
Exalted, his close minded hands,  
See a Czar in the stony swagger,

And the student body, submissively lies
With his feet.  Outside the college
The headmaster is heard. Grossly,
He is their dream and only shepherd.

His hands ring in the upper classes.
There, in the morning light, his will
Is forged, bent, as truth, on ruling  
This place, underhand, underfoot.

With shuttered ears divining his voice
The dim pupils see only what is said.
The top hand schools, topples all words
Ringing hands sing the song of fools.

How Headmaster trains on the heel,  
A dagger strikes, the paper cuts
Exalted, his close minded hands,  
See a Czar in the stony swagger,

And the student body, submissively lies
With his feet.  Outside the college
The headmaster is heard. Grossly,
He is their dream and only shepherd.

A young lad only fifteen, lived a hard life, grew up to be mean.
One day the lad being hard, got into a scrap in the schoolyard.

He was taken at once to the Headmasters room.
He was left alone to sit and reflect, awaiting his doom.

He began to ponder and wonder about his behaviour.
He thought, If I am always getting into fights, will anything ever come right.?
Will everyone I meet, walking down the   street, stare and pass me by, too scared to even say 'Hi'

The Headmaster took his seat and told the boy to stand.
He asked the boy why he was always so mean? Did he think it made him a man?

The boy took a while to think, took a breath and replied "i'm sorry for the trouble I cause, I've had a hard life but I can turn it around, if you can take a chance, find it in your heart to give me a new start".

The Headmaster was taken by surprise, looked into the boys  eyes and replied
"if as you say you will change your ways from today, then I will let you go on your way"
"should I hear any reports of you being mean and unkind, any reports of you crossing the line then you will be expelled, feel sure it's the truth that I tell"
"now be on your way don't let me see you again today"

The boy relieved ran out the room and went to every class until every exam he did pass.

His life turned out pretty good
, he got a job as a mechanic working under the hood.
His reputation grew far and wide, he worked hard and with lots of pride.

Then one night working late, a beautiful young girl brought in her car, and plucking up courage he asked her on a date.

Two months later down on one knee he asked her to be his wife, thankful for the second chance he was given to turn around his life.

Five years further down the line, now  Father himself to two.
The Headmasters car had broken down. The boy now a man, towed his car into the garage.
He told the Headmaster of his marriage, how he owned his own home and ran his own garage.

The Headmaster puffed full of pride, glad the lad had turned his life around, and was living a life that was now sound.

You see that day Five years past was to be the Headmasters very last, he was feeling happy and carefree.

Between you and me, he did relate to the boys state, having lived a hard life too.

In his early days the Headmaster's life had been saved when someone gave him a chance.

With this in mind and feeling generous of spirit he gave the boy a chance to prove, the boy took it as he had nothing to lose.

Doesn't everyone deserves a second chance?
©jackiemm158

Let me climb the intellectual bandwagon of Chamara Sumanapala of the Sunday Nation in Sirilanka, to recognize a world literary fact that Taras Shevchenko was the grandfather of literature that paid wholesome tribute to Ukrainian nationalism. In this juncture it has to  be argued that it is ideological shrewdness that has taken Russia to Crimean province of Ukraine but nothing like justifiable law and constitutionalism. Let it also be my opportune time for paying tribute to Taras Shevchenko, as at the same time I pay my homage to Ukrainian literature which is also a cultural symbol of Ukrainian statehood. Just like most of the European gurus of literature and art of his time, Taras Shevchenko received little formal education. The same way Shakespeare and Pushkin as well as Alexander Sholenystisn happened to receive education that was clearly less than what is received by many children around the world today.
Like Lucanos the Greek writer who wrote the biblical gospel according to saint Luke, Taras Shevchenko was Born to parents who were serfs. Taras himself began his life being a slave. He was 24 years a serf. He spent only one fourth of his relatively short life of 47 years as a free man. The same way Miguel Cervantes and Victor Marie Hugo had substantial part of their lives in prison. Nevertheless, this largely self-educated former serf became the headmaster, the guru and fountain of Ukrainian cultural consciousness through his paradigmatic literature written basically in the indigenous Ukrainian language. He was a prototype in this capacity given that no any other writer had made neither intellectual nor even cultural stretch in this direction by that time.
And thus in current Ukraine of today, Taras Shevchenko is a national hero of literature and collective nationalism. But due to the prevailing political tension between Ukraine and Russia, his Bicentenary on March 9, 2014 was marred by hoi polloi of dishonesty ideology and sludge of degenerative politics. For many us who derive pleasure from literature and diverse literary civilizations we join the community of Ukrainians to remember Taras Shevchenko the exemplary of patriotism, Taras Shevchenko the poet as well cultural symbol of complete state of Ukraine.
There is always some common historical experience among the childhood conditions of great writers.  In the same childhood version as Wright, Fydor, Achebe, Nkrumah, Ousmane and many others, Shevchenko was born on March 9, 1814 in Moryntsi, a small village in Central Ukraine. His parents were serfs and therefore Taras was a serf by birth. At the age of eight, he received some lessons from the local Precentor or person who facilitated worshippers at the Church and was introduced to Ukrainian literature, the same way Malcolm X and Richard Wright learned to read and write while in prison. His childhood was miserable as the family was poor. Hard work and acute poverty ate up the lives of the family, and Tara’s mother died so soon when he was nine. His father remarried and the stepmother treated Taras very badly in a neurotic manner. Two years later, Taras’s father also passed away. Just in the same economic dint poverty ate up Karl Marx until the disease known us typhus killed her wife Jenny Westphelian Marx.
The 19th century Russian Empire was largely feudal, Saint Petersburg being the exception, just like the current Moscow. It was the door and the window to the West. Shevchenko’s timely and lucky break in life came when his erratic landlord left for Saint Petersburg, taking his treasured serf with him. Since, Taras had shown some merit and knack as a painter, his landlord sent him to informally learn painting with a master. It was fashionable and couth for a landlord to have a court painter in those days of Europe. However, sorrow had to build the bridges in that through his teacher, Shevchenko met other famous artists. Impressed by the artistic and literary merit of the young and honesty serf, they decided to raise money to buy his freedom out of serfdom. In 1838, Taras Shevchenko became a free man, a free Ukrainian and Free European.
As it goes the classical Marxist adage; freedom gives birth to creativity. It happened only two years later, Taras Shevchenko’s collection of poetry, Kobzar, was published, giving him instant fame like the Achebean bush fire in the harmattan wind. A kobzar is a Ukrainian string instrument and a bard who plays it is also known as a Kobzar. Taras Shevchenko also enjoyed some literary epiphany by coming to be known as Kobzar after the publication of his collection.
He was dutifully speaking of the plight of his people in his language, not only through music, but even poetry. However,  there were unfair and censuring restrictions in publishing books in Ukrainian. But lucky enough, the book had to be published outside Russia.

Shevchenko continued to write and paint without verve. Showing considerable merit in both. In 1845, he wrote ‘My Testament’ which is perhaps his oeuvre and best known work. In his poem, he begs the reader to bury him in his native Ukraine after he dies. Not in Russia. His immense love for the land of his birth is epitomized in these verses. Later, he wrote another memorable and compelling piece, ‘The Dream’, which expresses his dream of a day when all the serfs are free. When Ukraine will be free from Russia. Sadly, Taras Shevchenko came to his demise just a week before this dream was realized in 1861.
Chamara Sumanapala wrote in the Sirilanka Sunday Nation of 16 march 2014 that, Taras lived a free man until 1847 when he was arrested for being a member of a secret organization, Brotherhood of St Cyril and Methodius. He was imprisoned in Saint Petersburg and later banished as a private with the Russian military to Orenburg garrison. He was not to be allowed to read and paint, but his overseers hardly enforced this edict. After Czar Nicholas II died in 1855, he received a pardon in 1857, but was initially not allowed to return to Saint Petersburg. He was however, allowed to return to his native Ukraine. He returned to Saint Petersburg and died there on March 10, 1861, a day after his 47th birthday. Originally buried there, his remains were brought to Ukraine and buried in Kaniv, in a place now known as Taras Hill. The site became a symbol of Ukrainian nationalism. In 1978, an engineer named Oleksa Hirnyk burned himself in protest to what he called the suppression of Ukrainian history, language and culture by the Soviet authorities.

My first memory of a loom was as a seven year old. I had been taken to visit this school my parents had so often spoken about and for which I had been carefully prepared. I had endured Mrs Martin's violin lessons every Saturday morning and could play after a fashion. She used to call me Tishee after a racehorse who used to stand with its legs crossed. But I could sing . . and I belonged to a family dynasty of choristers. So after a bout of auditions, to which both my mother and father accompanied me, I found myself entering the headmaster's house. And there in an immaculate room with a floor to ceiling window I saw my first Scandinavian furniture and what I now know to be a vertical rug and tapestry loom.
 
I had never seen anything so mysterious and beautiful. I realise now as I examine this memory it was not just this loom and the partially completed textile on its frame but the effect of the room it occupied and its aspect, the way the garden beyond the vast window invited itself into the interior space.
 
Biddy, as we boys called the headmaster's wife, was the most interesting woman I had ever met. I realise now how much she became my first model of womanhood. A graceful figure, bobbed hair, always simply dressed in a vivid coloured shirt of blue or red and a grey skirt, always walking purposefully, and when she spoke to you she acknowledged you as a real person, wholly, never as just a boy, but someone she gave her whole self to address. As I grew older she entered my dreams and even now her voice, that I came later to know as Varsity and Beneden bred, I can hear now. And she was a weaver.
 
Every afternoon she shut the door of her workroom with its large window and was not available, even to her beautiful children.
 
It was a year before I dared to talk to her about her loom. I remember her surprise. How lovely you should ask she said. Come after Evensong and I'll introduce you. And I went . .
 
It was May and she was wearing a grey smock that fell over slacks. She smelt like a forest in high summer, resinous. She wore sandals and a gentle smile. You may touch she said, and so I did, and as I did she quietly named the parts - the beater, the leashes, the warp, the reed. It was though I already knew these things but in another time and place. I was just renewing my acquaintance.
 
So, little by little, I would find myself sitting in the corner of Biddy's garden studio in the long summer afternoon's when my disappointing prowess on the cricket field allowed me freedom. I sat and watched and wondered. I imagined a day when I would have a room and a loom and wife like Biddy with whom I could talk about all those things I so wanted to share but had no one to share them with. This was before adoration became confused with ***, such a wonderful time in a boy's life.
 
As I sit at my loom in my studio high above a city street and my hands touch the yarn, pull the beater against the fell of this sample for my first  rug, place my stockinged foot on the outside treadle, I can almost sense the scent of Biddy Allen, feel her graceful presence, hear her Oxford voice and spirited laugh. For me she will always be a defining presence of the feminine and her long fingers on her loom conjure the essence of the making of beautiful things.

“And what do you think? Are there cliques in seventh grade?”
SHE
stands alone.
But not really.
“Absolutely.
There are cliques.
There are the Country-Club-Better-Than-You-Stuck-Up-Brats,
and the Future Fascists of America
and the group evvvverybody likes,
or at least,
that’s what they think,
who wouldn’t like them,
what’s not to like?
Y’wanna know what,
there are more cliques too,
the Invisibles,
two groups of Invisibles,
boys and girls broken up into Invisibles,
the Idiots, sittings with the CCBTYSTBs,
actually,
they’re sort of the same.
And there is exclusion,
there are hurt feelings,
there have been hurt feelings,
there is the hurting of feelings,
this is real,
this is honest,
this is now.”

Silence,
louder than HER words,
echoes
through the room,
bouncing off walls,
ringing in my ears.
No one applauds
as they have to the rest;
nobody applauds
nobody
applauds,
nobody
applauds
because nobody agrees
wants to admit it.
I do not applaud,
but I do.

“What are the weaknesses the seventh grade shares?”
Immaturity.
No common sense.
Lack of any sense of responsibility.
Idiocy.
SHE
contributes.
She says what my mind has created,
She understands
without me telling her.
But no,
they cannot listen to HER
with her true statements,
they don’t want to face the truth,
but they say,
We don’t want to look bad,
but they cannot handle the truth
is all.
“We are NOT immature,
we aren’t idiots,
we have common sense,
we’re responsible.”
Really.
Huh.
Never knew that.
I guess I’m just not up to par with my knowledge of the cliques.
Idiot.

“What are some strengths the seventh grade shares?”
SHE
has realized
that SHE is going to be ignored.
She does not
contribute.
But this time
I
do.
“For the most part,
most of us,
we are honest.”
They stare
with widened eyes.
She speaks.
Yep. I’m speaking.
I’ve been speaking.
Always.
What?
Oh.
Okay.
You don’t talk loud enough. We can’t ever hear you.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry, you liar.
You haven’t been listening.
But it’s okay.
I understand.
I’m used to that by now.
And now,
I can safely say,
so is SHE.

“Why would you go and say something like that?”
Staring with their penetrating eyes
that seek for the truth,
Why could you say what we needed to keep under wraps,
didn’t we tell you we don’t want to look bad?
“You haven’t been here
but a half a school year.
You really don’t know,
you
don’t
know,
so you can’t speak,
be quiet,
be
quiet,
be silent.”
Be silent
as the snow
on the coldest day of winter,
be silent
as the
clouds
after the biggest summer storm,
silent
as
the
rain
hitting
cold
hard
hearts.

*Thank you to Laurie Halse Andersen for coming up with that in her book Speak. (I created everything except for the Future Fascists of America bit.)


This poem symbolizes honesty and a lack of willingness to face the truth in middle school especially. On Thursday (March 22, 2012) there was a 7th grade meeting. The headmaster the seventh graders to get in groups that the homeroom teachers had put us in. My friend Cam and I wound up in the same group, which was pretty great. The headmaster asked us, “What are the strengths of the seventh grade?” “Weaknesses?” Someone said we tend to be “cliquey.” Mr. Chambers asked who agreed with her, and people said “no,” or “just a little” and someone said, “I think we have cliques but not the mean kind.” and Cam stood up and said that she absolutely thought we were very cliquey.
When I had SHE in capital letters in the poem I met that although Cam was speaking, I had thought the same exact words. When she is lowercase, it means that just Cam was speaking. When I said I don’t applaud, but I do, I mean that I didn’t physically applaud, but in my mind I applauded her and supported her every step of the way because she was brave enough to speak her mind and I am shy and reclusive.
“…I don’t give a nargle’s bonbon what they think of me,” is what she told me when I told her how brave she was. Before that, she had told the people who confronted her and called her a liar, “you’re just in denial.”
Soooo in a way, this is dedicated to Cam’s honesty!