Dangel's "First Grader's Country School Lesson"

He remembers one day from his first grade year. It
was winter. During the noon recess, Benny and the
other big boys built an igloo in the far corner of the
schoolyard. Benny took a candle and a hatchet and
crawled inside.Benny's friends rounded up the little
boys and made them crawl into the igloo,  one at a
time.   Each came out looking frightened. His turn
came, and he was kicked in the butt and pushed on all
fours inside the snow cave. He found himself kneeling
over a block of ice, where a candle flickered, stuck in a
Dad's Root Beer bottle. Benny stood above him like a
giant. Black shadows danced up on benny's face as he
raised the hatchet and said, "Are you loyal to Benny?
Say it, I'm loyal to Benny."
   He said it. "I'm loyal to Benny."
   That night at supper his father asked, "What did
you learn in school today?" 

Here's what I think. It's a poem, not because it's strikingly beautiful, not because its rhymes (it has none) enchant, or its rhythms carry us somewhere we've never been. Its architecture is unusual. If I could, I'd type it in as it appears in Home from the Field, the collected poems of Leo Dangel. There, this little story sits perfectly square, save for indents on the final two lines. 

But it's not the shape of the poem (is it supposed to be a schoolhouse?) that fashions the story. What finds its way into your soul is not how it sounds or looks, but exactly what the story-teller has never quite forgotten.

That story isn't spelled out on the page but rises hauntingly from inside your heart when you hear it. It's about more than the words say it is.

The story he remembers is about bullying, but bullying isn't at the heart of things. Most every playground has a Benny, even if those playgrounds don't have igloos and hatchets. That story is all about being scared. 

But the greater fear, really, rises with that last haunting line. It's a realization most of us come to with the father's everyday question, because maybe for the first time in his life the kid can't answer truthfully. He can only lie. What the boy learned that day at school was a story about Benny and the hatchet in the igloo, but what he is entering right there at the dining room table is an even more difficult world. He simply can't tell his father what happened. 

Maybe it's just me. Maybe you don't feel the bars of the prison the boy finds himself in, wanting to unburden himself, but knowing he can't. At school that day things happened that shouldn't have, things that are so bad the boy risks something worse by telling them. He knows he'll have to live with Benny, find his own way through, learn to get along somehow in a world where his parents have no clue to what's happening, even though they too have similar stories they won't tell.

This odd little square poem is about feeling alone and scared for the very first time in a world so harrowing it can't be spoken of. 

What makes "A First Grader's Country School Lesson" a poem is not the richness of its expression, but the way it speaks to the heart with a voice that awakens our own lives and actually brings us together, even though Benny tries so hard to keep us apart.

There's nothing beautiful about this poem except what it awakens in those who read it. It's as much alive as we are.