They teach us metrics like a checklist,
syllables counted like coins, rhythm weighed and filed away.
We learn to admire the beast from a glass box: dissected, annotated, politely dead.
They hand us diagrams of feeling and expect tidy answers.

We are asked to tame metaphors into essays, to translate thunder into bullet points.
We paste sticky notes over living lines until the poem looks respectable and obedient.
We practise the safe reading – identify, explain, apply – the ritual of shrinking wonder.
We learn the vocabulary of distance and not how to stand inside the heat.

We are given rules and not given permission to break them; we measure the moon and miss the pull.
Classrooms file away the messy verbs that teach us how to arrive at feeling.
We grade voice as if it were tidy handwriting and ignore the tremor that teaches truth.
We value the answer that fits the rubric and forget the question that makes us brave.

But poetry is a hunger, not a form. It is hands learning how to open, not knowledge to be boxed.
It asks for risk: a line that stumbles, a silence that holds, a meaning that arrives late and stubborn.
Teach the child to listen for the first sound of a sentence, to keep a pencil for surprise.
Teach how to fail a poem and come back with new language like a friend.

Replace the checklist with workshops that smell of ink and regret and laughter.
Replace the annotated corpse with a living poem read aloud, argued with, sat with.
Give permission to answer with a drawing, a chord, a walk, a sticky note of feeling.
Teach that the right response can be a question that keeps the poem working on you.

Poetry is taught wrong when it is taught like a test;
let it be taught like a door.
Teach it as hunger; teach it as repair;
teach it so we remember how to be surprised.