"The instructor said:
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you-
Then, it will be true. " -Theme for English B by Langston Hughes
Ten minutes.
Is that all it takes?
To pour a piece of my soul,
Onto this page?
If it were up to the schooling system,
I could write and write and write.
But not a word of it would be True.
Not a word of it would be me.
Not a shard of my soul would be seen.
If given the chance I could write for hours
Page after page
Verse after verse
No need to stop or slow down
I know that my own Voice, I have already found.
I could talk about the love, the hurt
Anything others wanted to hear.
Or I could write about absolutely nothing.
Does writing about nothing count as something?
If the words on the page mean nothing to me,
Should I still be congratulated on the "good" work that they see?
My eyes are dead as I am praised for the work I forgot I wrote.
Because I didn't mean a single note.
This sometimes makes school simple.
If I say what they want to hear,
Then I pass and move to the next class,
While graduation grows near.
But what if I lose my Voice?
As so many others have.
I think that I would go mad.
Ah, it would seem my time is up.
Tell me then,
Was ten minutes enough?
Did I place a piece of my soul in this poem?
Or did it mean nothing to me,
As so much of our educational writing does.
The first stanza was a prompt given to me by my English teacher. He then told us he would give us 10 minutes to write anything. This is what I came up with.
