In Their Hopeless Schools Poem by Robert Rorabeck

In the school:
Echoes of bleach- pitifully superficial
Holocaust
Of adolescent fanfare the busses bring here:
Children come here
And they are lost- from class to class:
What brings them? They have no
Will to learn,
But they giddy up through the turnstiles
With youth to burn:
And I watch them matriculate from
Copper state to bronze-
The airplanes don’t even pretend to brush them:
The airplanes leap across the canals
These children don’t even think to leap across:
The greatest angels burn their
Fuselages across the milkweeds and the puss willows:
The pilots are taking their stewardesses into
The bosoms of the mountains,
Populated with wildflowers and honey due:
To make love
Far above the mindless heads of the children
In their hopeless schools of every afternoon.