the deepening ground

One of the joys of being a teacher lies in the different duties we absorb to fill up any free time we might waste preparing lessons or grading student work. Of course that’s not really the case; we all have duties to perform. It’s just hard, sometimes, when you have a stack of papers that need to be graded and returned to your students and you get to spend forty minutes watching students play basketball in the gym or deathhack in the courtyard, weather permitting. (The game is not nearly as horrific as it sounds; follow the link to a Medium post about the game.) Such has been my experience over the past month. Don’t get me wrong: I still value the brain break and I really DO need to get out of my room more often.

However, watching a group of students either skip or race through lunch in order to play “DeathHack” has captured my attention, especially considering the odd juxtaposition of their game in the close proximity to a piece of modern art which they use as a clothing rack-of-sorts. In fact, it has kept me from finishing a poem I have been working on for the past two weeks about building a retaining wall with rocks from Wolf Creek. What follows is a poem in the style of a sonnet, but with a structural form that better echoes the format of the game: sets of three rather than four, which is more typical in a sonnet form. The term “adumbration” best encapsulates what I hoped to achieve with this sonnet: a partial outline that suggests or foreshadows something bigger about humanity in general. I dedicate this poem to the students of Grove City High School who faithfully “beat the grass brown…beside [the] stalks of steel sprout[ing] from the ground.” (You do know who I allude to in the final line, right?)

Lunch Duty Adumbrations

Meditations on DeathHack over Lunch

By Vincent H. Anastasi 2024

In the courtyard, the students play DeathHack,
forgoing lunch and civil fellowship
to partake in the ritual elimination.
They beat the grass brown ‘round a drainage grate
and volley head to foot - one, two, three - then
cast their catch at some foe among the retreating throng.
Beside them, stalks of steel sprout from the ground,
forgotten modern art like last year’s fad,
reduced to little more than a glorified coat rack.
The artist whose voice we must strain to hear
would not stand idly by as I do now
watching the steady transformation of time and space.
     I ponder this and question more than art:
     what a piece of work is the human heart.