A Teacher’s Fall

Your face never
belonged to me.
I was loaned it
for a while, by
due process and
bureaucratic regard,
never once suspecting
I’d come to regard
it as one of my own.

I fall in love every year.
And it is a fall:
A great gust of wind
sweeping pretence away,
stripping leaves that,
golden though they be,
do little aught but hide
the beauty of the trunk beneath.

It takes five weeks to fall.

And at the end of each year,
I am left, stripped bare and bereft,
a tree removed from a forest
or a forest removed of its trees
breathing air that was intended
to be shared by many sets of lungs.

Winter, summer, spring and fall,
only the annual dance is this:
—a falling—
—a glorious summer of ponder-ful delight—
—then winter, cold and bare.
You do not need me anymore,
and this is right.

One day, my heart will find a spring,
and heal from this annual decay.

A Letter To Myself

No one ever told me healing hurt this much
or if they did,
my heart wasn’t ready to understand:

Healing isn’t the gradual and effortless
knitting together of new skin over open wounds

It’s uncovering a part of your body to realise
that instead of smooth scar tissue,
there’s a wound plugged only with dirt and grit and stubbornness
and the skin around it is inflamed
and that’s why you’ve been aching
aching
aching

Healing is the unstoppering of wounds with foreign bodies
A splinter lodged in your palm that only you can remove
with a sterilised needled gifted to you by a therapist
or a TikTok
or a friend who went through something similar once.

Healing is the placing of a magnifying glass over your soul,
so that you can clearly see the inner structures
of a part of your insides
you never thought would be exposed
to discern which bits are you
and which bits are part of the fabric you were wearing when you fell
And sometimes, you get seasick trying to tell the difference
and so does the nurse assigned to help you.

Healing is plucking gravel, one laborious stone at a time, from your
knee, where you slipped thinking all was well,
when really the footwear you placed your trust in was slick and slippery as sin
And just as charming
And just as impractical for keeping your footing on a slick and slippery slope

Healing hurts far worse
than the numbness that lies beyond exhaustion,
the brain fogog-og—ogog of burnout
when you only realise some years later
that you didn’t just burn your candle at both ends,
you burned it in the middle too, then set fire to the stick
until the whole thing went up in a blaze, engraved with concepts
—like friends
—like family
—like peace
until one day,
the flame burned
out.

Healing is the long, arduous slog up a slope you ran quite quickly down,
led by others who ran before you who never knew,
had never been taught,
that the quickest way to the river that quenches thirst
just beyond the jagged, craggy hills
isn’t to barrel down the slope headlong
until you roll, crashing with broken limbs, into the gully,
and then to haul yourself back up the other side,
but rather to zipline across the gully in the first place
using the wire the clever ones who came before you strung.
But you didn’t know that
And neither did your role models
And so into the gully you ran.

Healing is a journey, fraught with tears and tempers and frustrations;
But, my love—
It took you years to get here.
Why do you keep assuming
it’ll take only weeks to get out?
What a good thing I packed you some water
and a rainbow
and a tiny, happy potato the internet once made.

Table Of Contents

• A Teacher’s Fall
• Art Is Light
• Art Is Dark
• A Letter To Myself
• And In Your Certainty, I Am Made Certain (Love Is Real)
• In Conversation We Are Healed
• About Which I Would Never Dare
• A Teacher’s Winter
• An Update At Age Ten
• For The Master Enabler, Aunty
• Now Our Own
• Without First Having Un—
• Over The Identi-Sea
• For My Audience Of One
• A House By Day / By Dark
• Emerald Enough To Eat
• Hear Me Out
• Make Her Own
• An Entrepreneurial Spring
• Enough For Daily Wear
• Unmazed
• Untethered And Refeathered
• All Hail Spring Rain
• In Which Spring Demonstrates Neatly Two Ways Of Change In A Single Day
• My Husband’s Desk
• Pier Spacings For One-Way Spanning Walls
• Old Stories New
• A Reprioritised Summer
• In The Calm In Between
• A Summer Sunset Storm
• Butterfly-Fest
• Camporee 2023 A
• Camporee 2023 B
• Camporee 2023 C
• Change Is In The Wind (And I Am Soaring)
• #Autumn Girl