i asked this teacher a question...

I asked this teacher a question

She told me “I don’t know”
And her answer cuts me deep
Like a mineshaft sunk too deep into the earth

Stripping it bare
Leaving a scar you can see from the atmosphere

I mean, she was a teacher...

The fountain of answers to the mysteries of the world
My personal statue of liberty lighting the way out of ignorance
My Harriet Tubman, who defiantly, desperately leads to knowledge even among the din of protest and fear

This teacher I’ve known all my life
From the old school – raised in the chocolate land of Virginia
Where secrets run deep like the south that it is
Secrets that are blacker than the skin of its inhabitants

And from there rose this giant ofwoman – all of 4 foot 11

Not a product of the environment but like a diamond pried
From the mines,
Said, "I’m gonna be a teacher" and did it
As a Clark Atlanta HBCU graduate
And took all she had and all she gained
And gave it back – time and time again

To the children.

See, to her they too were diamonds
To be cut and shaped and faceted
To shine – to be BRILLIANT

Couldn’t have kids of her own but
Kept the mantle of motherhood firmly around her shoulders
And in time took in 5 children who used to belong to someone else

She was a mother a teacher
A teacher - a mother
And at times the lines
Were often blurred - for, she taught her children
And mothered her students

She wielded epiphanies and ah-ha’s like weapons

And turned-on light bulbs for multitudes
Like Jesus with extra fish

She was an emancipated blacksmith who gave away keys to
Break out of shackles and handcuffs

 Her love was homemade pineapple ice cream for the whole class after her worst student Aced an exam

Her discipline was making her oldest son transcribe the dictionary at 9 years old for shoplifting candy bars

She planted the seed by making my class read
Encyclopedia Brown when the other class was struggling with Dick and Jane

She taught us why Indians aint Indian and how
Columbus sailed with faulty compass and
While we celebrate his blunder
A whole people went missing via genocide and ethnocentric plunder

She read us Langston Hughes and ee cummings
She ran us thru literary gauntlets with Pippi Longstocking and Frederick Douglass

Taught us spelling and spelling and more spelling and conjugation and more conjugation
How to keep decimals in line and using reciprocals in fraction multiplication

At recess she would play with the kids and I remember every time we played dodgeball she would be last one left 

She could move so fast and nimble

Nobody I mean nobody seemed to be able to hit her out –

This teacher polished every child that she taught, made them brilliant,

Shiny and
Faceted

And they twinkled and rose in value in every setting they settled into a future

This teacher, She had all the answers

Except for one
To the question I asked her,
She said, “I don’t know”

I was blind-sided – I knew no one was perfect
But there's exception to every rule, right?
A part of me died, killed – no, murdered- by that “I don’t know”

I was her bad student at times
Never late but always delinquent
Always-fighting-in-class
Who’d talk back, and get smacked and still talk back 
I was surely ultimately, disappointing to her

And the question I asked,
That solicited that soul rendering, soul destroying, “I don’t know”?
I asked it-

After a particularly troublesome day
Where, for some now unremembered reason
We sat in s child and parent confrontation

See, this teacher was my mother
And I, her adopted and oldest son
The one who had to copy that dictionary
Fingers cramping for 11 days straight

And the teacher – my mother – my teacher- said “I don’t know”
A soul shattering admission of ignorance-

When all I did was ask her:

“Do you love me?”