Ms. Teacher Lady

I work in a school
full and full of women.

children are too small to be men
or women, they are just products of women
who parade down the hallways with arms wild
and feet shuffling, spitting and dripping and laughing,
who can't contain their bodies unless
the Mrs. is watching with Her omniscient eyes, and
admonishing with a litany of familiar reprimands.

We are all women here
-except a pair of male teachers (gym, of course)
who, rather than diluting the estrogen in the atmosphere,
rather act as hairy, muscular foils to enhance it.
In their presence we are super-women, extra silly
and maternal, and we laugh and laugh because they don't realize
its only one of our faces.

In the morning, before the kids arrive,
what you hear is women in the hallways,
discussing births and deaths and husbands and recipes
and curriculum sure, of course, but that urge is not nearly as pressing
as the need to weave these threads into plaits, to stitch together life beyond the walls,
or life within the walls, where women laugh with ribald humour
out of earshot of the little'uns, where women put hands on shoulders
in moments of frustration and grief, and match cry to cry,
where women gossip and plan
and cross days off the calendar and teach how to tie shoelaces and
look at each other, across a stream of kids they're raising, and smile
because they are the village, the whole village, and somehow they
know it.