The Last Word
The Last Word
Miriam Riad
Don’t hold it against yourself
That you forgot your keys in the car,
Locking yourself out for over an hour
Stranded in a parking lot with melting groceries,
After a tumultuous day of trying to teach
Second graders how to read analog clocks
And write complete sentences.
Move on from clothes you left on the floor,
The bed you left unmade in a hurry.
From spending too many evenings
And afternoons and Sunday mornings alone,
Hiding.
You have learned;
These regrets are compostable.
Forgive yourself for giving roots and water
To the wrong ideas and thoughts
That tangled themselves together like weeds.
Absolve yourself for skipping all those meals
For telling yourself an apple counted as dinner.
Weeds may be stubborn but
Redemption is also perennial.
Give your bucket of remorse to the soil
And see what it can do.
Gather up the fragments of frenetic days
When every minute of your time
Was required by someone else,
Often, by a throng of young students
Who needed from you things you feared you lacked:
The right words, answers about teleportation and aliens,
And lots and lots of patience.
But mostly, you learned, lots of hugs; “I’m proud of you”s.
Mostly love.
Bless those exhausting days
Bless your heart
For giving everything
Even when circumstances were unfair.
Because one day, in June,
An eight year old who couldn’t tell you
The name of the number six back in September
Will be able to correctly add
387 + 249.
Chaos doesn’t get
The last word.
And from the scraps
Of what appears as waste
You will be surprised,
Because, against all odds,
The old coffee grounds
Browning banana peels
And empty cracked egg shells
Have a second act.
And one day
Maybe far off, maybe not
And maybe already here
You will find yourself
Sitting outside
On loamy ground, rich,
Its darkness holding
The waste you thought irredeemable.
From that soil,
All kinds of life
You’ve never seen,
Flora and fauna you didn’t even know
Could exist.
You’ll smile and maybe cry, too,
Because you remember how tired
You were, how things never seemed
To slow down.
You’ll pat the spongy earth,
Think of your old coffee grounds
Wonder why it took so long
To get here.
You’ll probably never know.
And you won’t need to.
Because you’ll remember
That in the midst of all the
Knotted thoughts
Turbulent days
The forgetting to make your bed
The feeling that you were never
Doing enough—
You’re not afraid of full meals now.
Your students sometimes
Accidentally call you “mom,”
You almost always remember
Your keys,
And an eight-year-old boy
Knows the name of the number six.
Miriam Riad
Writer & Teacher
Miriam is a public school teacher, writer, and former book editor. She is the author of 28 by 29: A Year of Writing, a short collection of essays and poetry. You can find more of her work at miriamriad.com
Photography by Jean-Philippe Delberghe