L.R. Harvey Poetry

a first-year teacher the morning before You remembers the way your baseball coach, who was like a father to him, would after practice tell the team there’s pride in being the first one there and the last to leave, but he never made it sound this tiring. It’s dark as you approach the high school’s double glass doors, the renovated entrance emitting a pulsing orangish light that guides you through the faculty lot, your classroom key in hand, into the silent gaping halls your trying desperately to fill by audibly humming “This little light of mine.” You remind yourself to be aware of joy in the little things: the warmth of eighty-seven copies that slide from the sleepy printer in rhythmic drumming, the mumbled “morning” of the early student who reclines against the cobalt blue lockers, the noise the mediocre workroom coffee machine   makes, beginning to drip with life.   You know that in about an hour the curtains on this darkened stage

checking into another Marriott The hotel lobby plays on repeat a scene of blue-green waves exploding on sea-side cliffs like party poppers, confetti riddling the air in an ocean celebration.                                        He's  seen it many times: The way one wave will drift back into another like shifting sands to share the honor of hitting the cliff another time, another time, and always another time, as if the communal act of wrecking rock in rhythmic rolls were its God-commissioned mission.   But this time, standing in the too-long line of automated businessmen in suits who shift their weight and check their watches and roll their eyes exactly like they were programed to, he watches the automated lobby loop and he cannot help but notice the fact that rock, the hardest of natural substances, is bound with time to chip and break away when exposed for long enough to this endless act – no wonder he and you and I, of su