It’s back-to-school season.
Students, parents and educators are all carrying backpacks full of feelings and hopes.
We invited Indianapolis-based poet and teacher David Strange to help us usher the season with a poem.
Strange teaches English at the Excel Center, Meadows, a free public high school for adults. He also hosts the monthly reading series Listen, Please, every second Thursday of the month at Chatterbox Jazz Club, and curates the biannual poetry and art exhibit “This Could Be Everything” at the White Rabbit Cabaret.
When he’s not teaching or writing, you can find him walking his pit bull, Hilda, around the Old Northside, grabbing Calabrian focaccia from Amelia’s in Windsor Park or talking about the Indiana Pacers.
Can you tell me what you were thinking about when you wrote this poem?
What I really want to get across is this all-enveloping sense of what education could be to someone.
It can be: Being submerged in a pool, but coming out the other side, the hot days don’t feel as hot anymore, right?
It could be: a long, long walk, and it’s a shaded spot.
Education isn’t going to be everything, but it’s there to help you. It’s there to surround you. It’s there to give you a rest or the strength to push on.
How long have you been a teacher?
I’ve been a teacher for over five years. I was a social worker and then I got back into education in 2021.
Is there a favorite book that you like sharing with your students?
Yeah, I generally teach “Fahrenheit 451” to students. I teach adults.
Seeing students read this book and then make connections to our world today is why I like reading it and teaching it. It might not be the most joyful — a reason I am glad to see students take something from that book.
What do you want listeners or readers to take away from your poem?
Education is not something that stops when you’re 18. It’s something that can be a lifelong thing. You graduate high school, you can go to college, but if you can or don’t, you can still learn, right?
Education isn’t something that always happens inside four walls with someone standing at the front or in front of a blackboard or — not to date myself — a whiteboard. It’s something that can happen forever in your life, and I think that’s something that people forget. I hope that this poem can help them remember.
Do you have any advice for aspiring poets out there?
Just write — 70% of it is probably going to be bad, but that’s ok. If you feel like a poem is bad, that’s ok. Take it to a friend, put it away. Maybe you’ll come back to it. Just keep on writing.
‘Education Like the Sea’
a poem for my mother
Education must be an act of love, and thus, an act of courage. — Paulo Freire
I want to tell you of an ocean.
You’re in the middle of it,
or if the vastness of that image
fills you with dread, it’s
a pool. A clear blue pool.
I want to tell you of a clear blue pool
you’re standing next to on an almost unbearably hot summer day.
You know, the ones
where the humidity is smothering and
you can see waves of heat rise from off the blacktop.
The sweat on your skin has failed
in its job
of cooling you off,
or down.
But remember, the pool is there,
the glistening mirror of a surface waiting to be dis-
turbed. By you.
The water ready, being submerged
may be a shock at first, but then relief. A respite.
And when you emerge from below,
the heat has loosened its grip.
I want to tell you of a shaded spot. Maybe
after a long-drawn-out hike
and you come across this grove to rest.
Maybe you’ve finished working
in your yard and the sun is now casting shade
over a spot that’s perfect for a sit.
You can feel the temperature
drop a few degrees.
Your eyes no longer need protection. Your muscles
recoup energy they gave to the work.
When you leave the shade,
your work doesn’t seem
as heavy.
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Jennifer Delgadillo is Mirror Indy’s arts and culture editor. You can reach her at jennifer.delgadillo@mirrorindy.org.
David Strange is a Mirror Indy freelance contributor and co-editor of the poetry and art journal Door’s Always Open. Follow him on Instagram @dcstrange.
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