I have had so many unforgettable English teachers throughout high school. Each taught me valuable lessons and showed me love.
The first day of my 9th grade year, my English teacher gave each of us a white paper heart. She related to Fahrenheit 451, our summer reading novel, and asked us to imagine a world with no electricity: a world with no entertainment provided by television, radio, or even books.
“What” she inquired, “would you still have with you? What would stay in your heart and mind?”
I spent the whole class period filling my paper heart with poems and stories and songs and verses I had committed to memory.
This is one poem that will stay with me when the lights go out.
The Cold Within
Six humans trapped by happenstance
In bleak and bitter cold.
Each one possessed a stick of wood
Or so the story’s told.
Their dying fire in need of logs
The first man held his back
For of the faces round the fire
He noticed one was black.
The next man looking ‘cross the way
Saw one not of his church
And couldn’t bring himself to give
The fire his stick of birch.
The third one sat in tattered clothes.
He gave his coat a hitch.
Why should his log be put to use
To warm the idle rich?
The rich man just sat back and thought
Of the wealth he had in store
And how to keep what he had earned
From the lazy shiftless poor.
The black man’s face bespoke revenge
As the fire passed from his sight.
For all he saw in his stick of wood
Was a chance to spite the white.
The last man of this forlorn group
Did naught except for gain.
Giving only to those who gave
Was how he played the game.
Their logs held tight in death’s still hands
Was proof of human sin.
They did not die from the cold without
They died from the cold within.
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