Lessons in Space

I imagine I had a teacher once who wrote about the Space Shuttle Challenger. Her poem discussed how lovely it would have been for this teacher to be able to give her students a lesson from space, but the tragedy that followed taught them something different. It is a haunting and beautiful poem.

I also imagine that I had another teacher who was a tall and respected jazz poet. I imagine that his class was challenging and important in an ivy-covered brick building.

People talk about his many poetry collections:

Selected Poems
"No other poet has embodied the riffs and modalities of jazz and blues more exquisitely than Michael S. Harper... But beyond the brilliant turns and shifts of Harper's poems are their clear-eyed and compassionate dealings with the hard news of life." Rita Dove, The Washington Post
Story-telling, the blues and jazz are very much part of Michael Harper's background, and it is therefore hardly surprising that this extraordinary collection by one of America's leading poets is full of a music and a rhythm that is both compelling and deeply moving. Concerned with the often painful historical legacies of family and race, Harper re-visits personal and black history in these poems, in which we not only hear the driving syncopations and heady improvisations of Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis but also the cadences of those towering literary figures — among them Yeats and Keats — that have so much influenced him.

This is Michael Harper's first publication in the UK.

"His poems, through sheer human grace, draw me directly into his life; he seizes me by the hand, and I respond anew to the simple validity of his experience." Kay Boyle, San Francisco Chronicle
"... among the front ranks of poets today." Yale Review

I imagine a lot these days.
I imagine that when a friend inspires someone. There is a responsibility to teach along the way.
Such lesson include:
Be careful
Cover your tracks
Be untraceable in creating

I untrace for a friend.