The Blackboard
The question itself has not changed
but only the depths of memory
through which it rises and now in a late
dream of childhood my father is a blackboard
that I have just erased and I am standing
with my back to it holding the old worn gray
felt eraser that we will take later
out into the schoolyard and will clap it
against the others that were used today
and the clapping will raise a cloud of white dust
a thin ghost that will float above us
for a moment and then will be gone
and no more rises from the old erasers
almost clean and then how had my father
come to be on the blackboard it may have been
because of what he liked to call sins
of omission which sounded impressive
and he thought would impress the congregation
and where are they now the sins of omission
where is the cloud the schoolyard the dream
even now I am forgetting them
— W.S. Merwin
“The Blackboard” was published in The New Yorker 90/32 on October 20, 2014.
To browse through our archive of previously posted Poems of the Week, click here.
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Chalk dust photo above is by Andrew Reilly, and is used under Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)
