Pearls

A poem written after my 3rd or 4th year of teaching.

“Do not cast pearls before swine”
“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a pearl of great price”
~The Words of Jesus

Pearls

While the teacher stood and expounded the ancient truths of God
heaven opened,

and a shower of pearls rained down upon the students,
clacking and dancing upon the tile floor,
bouncing off petrified hearts
like hail on concrete.

The sound was deafening, but no one heard,
no one reacted, grasped the priceless pearls,
no one noticed their presence.

Seeing they could not see and hearing they could not hear.

Stillness settled over the room. The dance of the pearls was over.
An insolent student asked,
“When does this class end?”

Whereupon the bell rang
and the students herded for the door
like suffocating desperate animals pressing for air,
trampling and kicking the pearls
now scattered aimlessly about the antiseptic tile.

A few tripped over them and cursed them,
incensed that they had impeded progress to the exit.

But at last they were free of the classroom.

Later that evening,
the night janitor was puzzled to see that thousands of pearls were left behind.
He assumed they were worthless, having been so abandoned.

And so, these pearls,
the sublime treasure of God,
the fruit of God’s mind,
offered freely in order to be treasured as ornaments of the human mind,
were both regarded as trash and discarded as trash.

May, 2005