(With inspiration from, and apologies to, Allen Ginsberg…)

I saw the best minds of my generation
trying to get thirty teenagers
to care about a metaphor
at nine‑thirty on a Tuesday,
holy fools of fluorescent corridors
dragging whiteboard pens like relics,
summoning meaning from photocopies
that still smell of warm toner.

I walked the tiled floors of the learning cathedral,
the budget‑cut basilica,
the sanctuary where the bells give way
to a wheezing fire alarm
and the incense is whatever the Hospitality class
is burning today.

O teachers, you saints of the half‑charged laptop,
you prophets of the differentiated worksheet,
you who carry whole universes in ring binders
held together by hope and a bulldog clip,
I have watched you stand before the restless tribes
and speak truth into the hum of fluorescent lights
as if the room itself might one day listen.

And I have seen the moments,
small, flickering, easily missed,
when a child looks up
with that startled, unguarded expression
like they’ve just glimpsed the machinery
behind the world,
and for a heartbeat
the whole curriculum makes sense.

But I have also seen you
at the end of the day,
slumped over marking
like monks illuminating manuscripts
no one will ever thank them for,
your red pen bleeding across the page
like a quiet, necessary wound.

I have heard your private howls
in the staffroom kettle’s whistle,
felt your quiet revolutions
in the way you straighten a desk,
rewrite a lesson,
hold a silence long enough
for a thought to be born.

And still you return,
day after day,
to the chalk‑dust altar,
the digital shrine,
the sacred mess of learning,
because somewhere in the noise
there is a spark,
and you are stubborn enough,
tender enough,
foolish enough
to keep striking the flint.