Breadcrumbs

The boy with flyaway hands has his palms squashed tight,
sandwiched between the plastic chair and nylon school trousers.
He nods sagely as I proof-read the essay
which is riddled with proof of all his diagnoses and deficiencies.
He nods sagely as my red pen bruises his ideas with grammar corrections.

I am kind, but he is not a fool;
the gentle euphemism of my words
does not soften the brutality of his day-to-day reality.
He knows that full stops and capital letters are old-learning;
taught in some old-time when nylon trousers were ten inches shorter
and streaked with mud from flying through puddles at playtime.

I cap my red pen, aware of the bloody massacre that I have made of his page.
It was a bloody stupid task for him to have to do anyway – I didn’t choose it.

He risks releasing the slender fingers of one hand,
brushing back the fringe he hides behind.

His hand darts out,
sweeps across his face so quick I almost do not see it, and is gone again.

After a moment, my silence concerns him. We share rare eye contact.
My gaze flits off to the clock and his falls back on the table;
the slog we should be soul-crushingly, time-stretchingly, re-drafting.

I slide the paper off the desk.
Reach into my pockets and instead,
I scatter breadcrumbs,
saved from our conversation last week.

Theres another flick of eye contact, just a brief flutter.
Then a five-fingered dove breaks through the school clutter.
He’s released his hands – he’s opened the cote!
He’s explaining so clearly all the things that he wrote.
The doves fly full-speed in flicks and dives.
I can feel this boy here now; he’s real and alive.
His hands flap big circles and soar up above,
They fly for his passions and things that he loves.
These doves fly for peace, for resilience and hope.
They fly for the children who’ve just learned to cope.

He runs out of breath, and for a moment he stops,
the doves, no longer floating on a cloud of hot ideas drop.

The boy with flyaway, give-away hands
looks furtively around the library,
as he shoos his enthusiasm away
back into his dovecote-pockets.
He pulls his shoulders up to his ears like a drawbridge.
“You have some fantastic ideas!”, I say, and I mean it.

But I also want to say:
“Don’t forget to feed the doves,
preferably with poetry,
but anything that they’ll eat will do”.