This first lecture becomes a scalpel incision
diving directly to the doctor’s decision,
pushing way too early for the climax:
holding a young girl’s jaw open,
forcing his wooden plank into her
mouth, asking blank faces what it means
to be ignorant versus complacent versus defiant.

The class hangs on this rhetorical thundering,
looking away like all the others at the suggestion
to make the inevitable calls to one’s mothers,
thanking them for making the hospitals give out polio shots.
He says how foreign that it is for them
to thank their fathers—even care what they have done,
until it is too late. He stares beyond the tops of bowed heads
at the back wall wondering why he wastes his time
trying to communicate; he starts a conversation
with words they can’t yet pronounce.

11/11/2011

Posted on 11/11/2011
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