Remembering Miss Spencer

My favourite lesson was English,
but as far as teachers were concerned,
telling tales of yore with relish,
only Miss Spencer could bring history to life.

She had taught my mother,  
was rotund with a kindly face, older,
always dressed in black,
with amber beads around her neck.

Daughter of an Egyptologist,
she’d visited the pyramids
and witnessed the opening of tombs;
she described them in a reverent whisper.

The stories I remember most
were at Halloween: the chilliest ghost
tales told in a darkened classroom with a single
candle, she made our naïve skin tingle,

especially when she read
M.R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’.
I was thrilled with fear and expectation;
Miss Spencer awakened my imagination.

Kim M. Russell,. 8^th September 3036

It’s Tuesday and time for Poetics at the dVerse Poets Pub. Our host is Punam, who tells us that this past Saturday, 5th September, they celebrated Teachers’ Day in India, which she says is “not simply a date on the calendar, it is a day of heartfelt tributes to educators who took our hands, opened our minds and touched our hearts”. 

Punam goes on to explain that “India, since the ancient times, has had the Guru-Shishya parampara, or the teacher-disciple tradition. Guru is the dispeller of darkness of ignorance, often also acting as a spiritual guide. Shishya is the disciple seeking learning and the truth.”

Punam shares poems on teachers by students, as well as suggesting poems by famous poets such as Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, Walt Whitman, Henry Derozio, Langston Hughes and Carol Ann Duffy.

Punam asks us to write poems about our teachers: school/college teachers, parents/grandparents, spouses, children or life itself. It can be a tribute, or it could be about the worst teachers we ever had.