​POETRY  -  
          With a Theme of Work

My real work is writing poetry   -    photo by Weebly.com                                                                   

Going Back to Work in Retrospect
by Karen Marker

​​It is a crisis finding teachers. I hear
they’ve pulled in campus security guards
to cover classrooms, they just can’t retain
anyone to bear the burden for all that’s broken.
Too many rules, active shooter trainings, computer
glitches, grades to give, too many mutated versions of viruses.
But I really did want to jump back in, to start again
because I love kids, teachers, the care in the classrooms, 
so much I dreamed of being there night after night 
that first year of retirement, those early days of the pandemic.
When my old boss told me there was an opening at the high school
where I’d always said I planned on returning, I thought of course
I’ll say yes. Only two days a week as a school psychologist,
that will work. Even if it means being back on the treadmill,
moving towards deadlines the laws demand. Five to respond,  
sixty for reports to be completed. Hearing the bells, labelling,
measuring, testing, using acronyms I’d forgotten. Even if just thinking
about it the pressure is mounting, still I would say yes.
But when the supervisor who knew me best, who’d asked me back,
said she’d need to check my references and she couldn’t be one
because that was protocol all I could see was bureaucracy
wearing away what I’d recovered of life. In retrospect
how could I have imagined giving up any time for a job like this
when my real work is writing poetry.
 

Vertical Divider

​​Karen Marker submits poems to Rattle’s Poets Respond (to the news) and reads this poetry on the open mic with RattleCast. This past May she was a featured reader for Rivertown Poets out of Petaluma. Karen was honored to win first place prize for an essay, “Ruth in the Redwoods,” in the 2021 Keats Soul Making contest and that one of her poems was chosen to be in the Kent State University Libraries Special Collections and Archives. Karen is also grateful that she had the opportunity to work with the Young Writers Program through Santa Cruz’s Cornerstone Project, and to work with so many talented poets through PandaPoets and through OLLI including Kathleen McClung, Diane Frank and Jannie Dresser.

Other pieces in this Issue:  
Poetry:
Customer Service
Custodian of the Light in San Francisco
Passing My Swim Test in the Freedom Summer

Vertical Divider

Vertical Divider