All the students are sitting on the floor, so are several teachers,

even the principal. The visiting poet is sitting on a chair.

 

There are perhaps a dozen students — silent, serious, though

they exchange occasional knowing glances and smiles.

 

The visiting poet, too, is silent. So are four or five teachers

and the principal – the room soundless, except for exhalations

 

and the recorded message that harried them into this small room.

The room is the principal’s office and every available inch of floor

 

is occupied by the eighteen people summarily herded by the principal

into his inner sanctum. For once, the visiting poet is voiceless,

 

no well rehearsed lines on his lips, though his eyes take everything in.

The pre-recorded monotony of dread booms everywhere via the school

 

intercom — into every classroom, gym, washroom, office, stairwell.

 

This is a school lock-down.

Get into a classroom,

clear the hallways, or leave

the premises immediately.

 

The principal knows this is just a drill: a post-Columbine reality

of departments of education. His school has failed to measure up

 

in a previous time-trial at emptying halls, hence this repeat drill.

Teachers and students know the score. They know about the ominous

 

SWAT unit sweeping the halls for deranged gunmen and other such

non-conformists. Only the visiting poet is uncertain, wondering whether

 

he may somehow have inadvertently set all this in motion the moment

he set foot inside the school and headed towards the main office.

 

The principal checks his wrist watch again, giving it a shake as if to hasten time. The bored teens shift and re-shift their lank shapes as only teens can.

 

The teachers relax, their day now blessed by an extended recess.

The visiting poet muses on imagery inherent in the word lock-down,

 

its currency in prison language. Lockout, lockup, lock step, lock-box,

lock jaw, lock, stock and barrel. His mind spins combinations.

 

He has already noted the principal locked the door behind him

before sitting on the floor. It’s the first time the visiting poet has been

 

confined in a principal’s office – he reflects on the irony: it has taken

him almost a lifetime to achieve this rare distinction. He also realizes

 

that choosing to sit where he has, his head is the only target visible

above the window line. The poet has again made himself vulnerable.

 

The intercom monotony ceases as abruptly as it began. The principal

stands, thanks everyone for co-operating and this seminar of the silent

 

disperses. The pulsing din of academia bursts to life from the ashes

and in the visiting poet’s head metaphors ricochet everywhere,

 

as he now attempts to emulate the springy step of his nubile hostess,

trailing her down the now-raucous hall to where they await his poems.

 

Glen Sorestad

Glen Sorestad is a well known Canadian poet from Saskatoon, who has published over twenty books of poems. His poems have appeared in over seventy anthologies and textbooks, in publications all over North America, in many other countries as well and have been translated into eight languages.

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