Yoga for the Apathy of Rocks
for the pandemic teachers who endure
By Britt Kaufmann
April 15, 2024
April 15, 2024
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Some of us women,
at the end of a long day, gather on the spacious auditorium stage in a community of quiet privacy, a half circle radiating tension to use our bodies to mend our spirits, engage our cores to center ourselves. We work on breath and balance like an equation; what we do to one side, is done to the other: Thread the right arm through the needle. Thread the left arm through the needle. Here, where we source our stress in drawn-up shoulders, clenched jaws, and blinked-back tears, we also ground our tree poses, cat-cow our way out from behind the curve of computers, huff out our held disappointments. This is about me. This is about us, though we don’t dare to ohm together lest we create the magic that heals us, and freed from the umbilical call to return like the tides, we cease to break ourselves on this work. |
Britt Kaufmann lives in the Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina where she enjoys gardening and reading sci-fi. Her poems have recently appeared in MAA: Focus, Scientific American, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and Anabaptist World. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Midlife Calculus, releases in September 2024 from Press 53.
Author's Note:
I have a great sympathy for teachers who have endured a grueling last four years in the classroom. We are all still reeling from the pandemic losses and what to do about it. As educators, we are learning how to balance our own (and our students’) mental/physical health against the need to catch up. As a former English teacher become math tutor, the connections between the two subjects often spark in my mind. I look for metaphors and stories to help make math concepts stick with struggling students: often those turns into poems. As one partial to puns, I particularly like putting half-circle and radiating (radius) in the same line. This poem is one from in my forthcoming full-length collection Midlife Calculus which chronicles my experiences as an in-class high school math tutor going through menopause while taking calculus for the first time in my late 40s. (People have done crazier things.)