You’re a poet, and you don’t know it, but your feet sure show it: They’re long fellows and they smell like the dickens!
The assignments at St. Leo the Great School could be challenging, and by that I mean they often challenged us to get out of our comfort zones. They challenged us to think outside the box. They challenged us to try something new.
With widely varying results.
We had exercises in public speaking: I drew “lunch” out of a hat as the topic for an impromptu 1-minute speech and riffed on how the Earl of Sandwich didn’t want to quit his card game so he had his meat stuffed into bread and the rest is history. It went well.
My classmate Don wrote “Don’t fidget with your tie” on the one 3×5 card each of us was allowed for our prepared speeches. I’ve long forgotten his topic, but I’ll never forget his brilliant self-admonition.
We wrote stories with morals, รก la Aesop’s Fables, and while some of us remembered going to bed early and not counting our chickens while embryonic, and others appreciated the one bird they had in their hands, James went all in with the story about a kid and his bike.
As I recall, in his modern fable, this one boy’s two-wheeler had streamers coming out of its handlebars and baseball cards flipping through its wheel spokes and, for whatever reason, these doodads attracted petty thieves. So the bike owner had to replace the streamers and his motorcycle-noise-makers not once, not twice, but three times, and after that, he swore he’d find out who was filching his stuff. After he tracked down the culprits — yes, it was a cabal — the crime victim slashed their bike tires and broke their wheels. The moral: What goes around comes around.
That was the first time I’d ever heard the expression, and not the last time James had a private “counseling session” with our stern principal.
It was the poetry assignment that earned me a similar session.
I was already the butt of too many jokes with my non-athletic string-bean frame and my avoidance of the sports section in the newspaper, so when our task was to compose a poem inspired by a color, I tried to put aside my straight-A nerdiness and be badass.
Hail, hail the crimson red
creeping down the stairs.
Could it be that someone’s dead,
bleeding through his hairs?
Could it be he’s reading
a strong and stirring book?
Could it be he’s bleeding?
Why not take a look — aha! Why not take a look?
I didn’t get an F. I didn’t get a grade at all. What I got was an order to write another poem and take the assignment seriously.
Oh, yeah — and the order came during my visit with the principal.
OK. No trash this time. To mine own self I was going to be true (I read that someplace).
So, in the first thing I ever wrote directly on the typewriter (a massive Underwood that, if I still had it, would be worth a pretty penny), I poured out my soul.
In truth, over the last 50 years, I may not have ever matched this mini-sonnet for pure innocence and flow.
Luna
Quietly setting, never forgetting,
Ol’ Sol turns out his light.
(something something; something something),
And now returns the night.
Hail! O god of darkness!
Hail, o moon above!
Luna, fair love, now hearkens
to the cooing of a dove.
“Luna” went on for another six or seven verses, to bring us through the night and back to dawn.
This was eighth grade. My freshman year in high school, I wrote a melody for it, a decent enough, hummable tune.
But then, the ravages of time….
I have no idea where my copy of the poem or the sheet music are, nor do I remember any more of it than this.
And to this day I can’t decide what’s the biggest tragedy — that the poem and song are missing, that I can’t remember the rest of “Luna,” or that I do remember, all too accurately, the full text of “Crimson Red.”
P.S. I got an A+ despite the references to pagan deities, and the sisters paraded “Luna” around the school and parish for weeks as proof of the school’s educational excellence. I never got to be badass. Ever. Which turned out fine.
