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Ripton, VT: North Branch School

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"Do y'all realize what this means?" I asked, trying to engender some awestruck wonderment. "Do you see what is happening? Steve has written a poem. This fantastic youngster is a poet. This sorry, pants-sagging teenager has got the juice!"

"Way to go, Steve," said Annie, in dutiful support.

"Steve wrote a poem?" said Doug, as though we had been presented with a sonnet typed by a chimp.

"Yes, he did indeed."

"Well, can we hear it already?" asked Mira.

"You guys," I said, ignoring her. "Steve turned this in without it being an assignment. He's thinking, his heart is pumping, he's got a pulse, he's alive. He's not just sitting brain-dead in front of a computer playing Diablo II. Well, he was this morning, but at least he wrote a poem before he did it. I'm proud of you, Steve."

I looked him in the eyes.

"Tal!" shouted Nick. "Can we hear it!"

"Of course we can hear it. But I have to get everyone all ginned up. This is a moment of great importance." And it was, because I wanted them all to feel and never forget what it meant for one of us to cross the threshold to become a maker.

"Okay, we're 'ginned up'! Or whatever you call it!" Nick clamored.

"But now we have to get our thing together, man," I said.

"We have our thing together, man!" they shouted.

"All right, all right. You're ginned up and we got our thing together, man. But wait, hold on, let me tell you about the time Steve Hoyt presented me and the North Branch School with his first poem he ever wrote on his own. One snowy morning I arrived in the dark classroom and it was sitting--"

"For god's sake already, read it!"

"All right. Y'all hush. Here it is."

And I read the poem, as delicate as a gossamer thread--small in stature, monumental in its existence.

They were silent, but looked over at Steve, who was blushing and dipping his head so that his greasy bangs hung over his face.

"I'm going to read it again," I said, and I did, according that slight poem every bit of dignity and loving attention I could.

"So, what do you all think?"

They all raised their hands. There was no more wonderful sound and sight than that class full of hands rising up because they had all been moved, that rustling and forward-leaning, smiling excitement of hearing and seeing as though for the first time.

"I think it was really great, Steve, that you wrote that and turned it in," said Annie.

"I'm proud of you, Steve," said Mira. "It shows a whole other side of you."

"It makes me want to go write a poem too," Nick added, smiling.

"We're waiting, Nick, we're waiting," I said.

"I have always thought of Steve as a grungy teen punk skateboarder," said Doug. "But obviously he has these other aspects to his personality. It makes me think that Steve is more of a student than he has shown so far. Sometimes it seems that he doesn't really care about school, or perhaps it's hard for him. But a poem. I'm impressed."

"I like what it was about, how he talked about--" Janine began, halting, not quite sure of what she knew or felt. "That part about being willing to never break a promise."

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" I said.

The praise and affirmation were real, expressing their growing awareness not of ideas or facts, but of each other. That poem was the beginning of a fountain of poems, from Steve, and from all of them. That is how we got our writing community together, and how the lives of these kids, once separate and distant, began to be stitched together. That was how we began to un-govern our tongues.

Adapted from A Room for Learning: The Making of a School in Vermont by Tal Birdsey. Copyright (c) 2009 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press, LLC