Meditation After School

Meditation After School  /  Joshua Alan Sturgill     

The light in an empty classroom differs from other light.  
Books at rest have a particular tension, as strings of an instrument 
anticipate the touch of the musician.
Chalkdust shimmers in the quiet steeply entering through western windows.  
I think: there is no mindless light.  Light is the thought of the Heavens.

When language ebbs, the air seems to be dreaming
and the shelves stand guard for duty's sake alone
and the walls continue the work of upholding for no less than the presence of the Divine.  
The doors to the empty classroom lose their utility
and become pure metaphor: 
doors of knowledge, doors of maturing, open to anyone possessing the key.  

Silence is a communal possession.  
This classroom belongs to all, even in disuse.  
Exclusions — of ages, subjects, grades — will widen out and become a society.
Exclusion is a pedagogical tool.  All are included in this exclusivity,
all pass through the narrow space of the Test alone.

To sit here, after the final bell, after the day's last burst of cacophonous momentum, 
is a true privilege — a true 'private law' — given, 
yet weighed out in time and blood and concentration.  
The classroom is a consolation for our loss of union with Nature, 
where we may discuss the stars we can no longer see, 
where we may taste history though our tongues have been scalded by future promises.  

I grieve for libraries without books.  
I grieve for teachers who are not the sacred repositories of Truth.  
I grieve for students who anxiously wish to fly home to the cage of their screens.
A man who cannot observe cannot be free.
A man who cannot write cannot find the depth of his thought.  
A man who cannot discuss and debate and consider 
cannot make his own thoughts strong and beautiful.  
And a man who cannot listen cannot recognize when strength and beauty fade.  

Teaching is a mystery; it is a passionless begetting; it is the gift of fire.  
Learning is a mystery; it is a welcoming of other minds; a becoming of more than self.

This classroom is taking its daily sabbath.  
It prepares itself for conversation by bearing speechlessness.  
I ask the full emptiness of this silent classroom: 'what is culture?' 
and it replies simply: 'whatever our children learn from us.'  
Books and dust and desks; trees and clouds and stars.  
Build an altar in one place, and everything becomes holy.
When we preserve dedicated halls of learning,
we find classrooms everywhere.  

All poetry and supplementary material: copyright 2025 by Joshua Alan Sturgill. All rights reserved.