To Teach

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.