A young child sits and waits and thinks,
And after a moment lifts a shaky hand,
His fingers had never touched a tool,
yet now he reaches out.
Curious and perplexed, his newness showing in his face,
He slowly raises the crayon to his eyes.
"What manner of thing is this?" he thinks..

Then looking up he sees his classmates,
Scribbling happily and mindlessly away,
The teacher making large awkward motions
Swooping strokes in horrible tones and shapes upon a paper on the wall.
Disgusted he looks back to his page and his disgust is forgotten
In the newness of the paper and in the vibrance of his crayon
and in the fullness of his mind a picture grows.
He diligently bends his head and meticulously inscribes his lines,
his image, his mark upon the page.
His delight grows as his creation develops,
joy he's never known he realizes now,
He hears a sound and raises his eyes reluctantly
from the page as his teacher approaches
She doesn't look pleased, he can't tell why, Why shouldn't she be pleased?
She snatched his hand and plucked the crayon from his startled grasp
In shock he stared as her face regained
a practiced expression of cheerful condescention
"That's not right," she said as she gently, .. (how strange
compared to the way she took it from me..).. oh so gently,
placed the crayon in his right hand.. patiently she says
"This is the way we do it.."
Quietly he answered. "But I can't do it that way.."
"That's why I'm here to teach you."
[Perplexion, anger, hurt, dismay]

She smiled again and patted him on the head as she walked away,
Leaving him more confused than before,
for "why should it matter what hand I use?"
"Couldn't she see my drawing? Didn't she like it?
Was it bad just because I didn't use the right hand to draw it?"
He looked back at his drawing to find it's glory sitting there,
waiting only for his hand to continue in its creation..
Slowly, with great trepidation he grasped his crayon tightly,
uncertainly in his other hand.
Perilously he drew. Slowly at first then with greater anger
as his unused hand refused to obey his mind.
He tried to finish his picture but his newfound awkwardness shone through..
Before, where it had been beautiful beyond reproach,
it now had gaping holes and sores upon its face.
His further attempts to right his errors only brought more faults.

He considered switching back to his other hand, just to finish this picture,
Then he could start another with his "other hand"
Surely his teacher wouldn't mind?
But then he thought about it and realized that HE would mind..
He didn't want to give in to her,
to allow her the satisfaction of believing he couldn't be taught,
or even that he would make the same error more than once..
So he sat, gazing at his picture, once so lovely, so fair,
growing so well beneath his hand,
Struck, suddenly and undeservedly by blind chance, so that now,
Handicapped as he was by his teacher's mandate,
He could no longer help it grow..

He had tried everything, but his futile attempts only worsened his picture's fate,
and his once fertile hands now spread only waste and carnage.
A tear rolled slowly down his face, unnoticed by his empty peers,
They all fit in, they had no need to look beyond themselves,
vultures all of them,
watching waiting for a sign of weakness
that would signal them to strike,
to cut out the cancerous differentness in their midst..
His only hope was that his creation
on it's own might grow and take on shape,
Free of it's creator, without his vision and free will to guide it.
Yet as he looked about once more he saw
the terrible expressions on his classmate's faces.
Horrible expressions, faces of people who would destroy a greater work
just so that nothing stood above the sameness of their own
Despair overwhelmed him as he realized his work was now alone in the world
and it could never grow without him.

09/25/2001

Posted on 09/25/2001
Copyright © 2024 Leandra K Brossard