To Teach
by Steve Petkus
Posted May 3, 2026
Posted May 3, 2026
We must not be frightened nor cajoled
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.
-Robert Hayden, Words in the Mourning Time, 1968
Cold November Monday, 1995,
Detroit Channel 4’s live coverage
of the funeral for Yitzhak Rabin,
slain Prime Minister of Israel:
I don’t have the jaw for tears,
though they come anyway,
my single life dim
and merely in the room.
Tin thermometer taps hard
against the side of the house.
Robert Hayden, I have your “Words”
laid out before me
President Clinton speaks, a yarmulke fastened over his whitening hair
and when I’m reading those lines
later, to my students, when I get to
“not be frightened nor cajoled,”
the skin on my back evaporates,
and I sway forward to the desk
before re-commanding my balance.
Easy to believe it’s the world
that teeters, harder to pin
a flagging on the limp thing
I’ve let myself become.
Hayden, we believe we reject evil,
King Hussein of Jordan uses the incredible word “brother,”
moving his chin toward the simple, flag-draped coffin
yet we jockey around it,
barter ourselves nearer to it
one day, more distant the next
and it remains, inexorable,
a default condition maintained
by better and better hackers
whose parameters lock us out.
I mourn Rabin, the man become,
as your King and your Kennedy,
One Israeli official reads song lyrics off a bloodstained page
which, oddly, has been laminated
“means.” It’s history itself
that coagulates here,
and in the face
of yet another installment
in what you call our history’s
“disastrous quest for meaning”
I barely stand, am today incapable
of the least inkling, feel
I have nothing to teach
Clinton’s yarmulke has slipped down the back of his head
and am somehow called to turn
that nothing into everything.
About the poet
Steve Petkus has poetry forthcoming in River Styx, and other poems have appeared recently in descant, I-70 Review, Pine Hills Review, Puerto del Sol, and Saranac Review, among others. This past year, his full-length manuscript was a finalist for the Stern Prize (American Poetry Review), and a chapbook was a semifinalist in the Black River Chapbook Competition (Black Lawrence Press). Steve holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, works as a high-school librarian in New Jersey, and lives in the Hudson Valley.