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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mary Ruefle
Mary Ruefle
Mary Ruefle is the author of several volumes of poetry, most recently A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006), an art book of "erasures", ...
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FURTHER READING
Back to School Poems
All the World's a Stage
by William Shakespeare
Apples
by Grace Schulman
Art Class
by James Galvin
Being Jewish in a Small Town
by Lyn Lifshin
Evening Walk as the School Year Starts
by Sydney Lea
First Gestures
by Julia Spicher Kasdorf
From "One A.M."
by David Young
In Michael Robins’s class minus one
by Bob Hicok
Mary's Lamb
by Sarah Josepha Hale
Messieur Degas Teaches Art and Science at Durfy Intermediate School, Detroit 1942
by Philip Levine
Niggerlips
by Martín Espada
Panty Raid
by Terri Ford
Pledge
by Elizabeth Powell
Sentimental Education
by Mary Ruefle
Sick
by Shel Silverstein
The Junior High School Band Concert
by David Wagoner
The Shout
by Simon Armitage
The Testing-Tree
by Stanley Kunitz
Theme for English B
by Langston Hughes
We Real Cool
by Gwendolyn Brooks
Why Latin Should Still Be Taught in High School
by Christopher Bursk
Essays About Teaching
A Treasury of Read-Alouds: Poetry for Children
by Jim Trelease
Can Poets Teach?: On Writers Teaching Writing
by Joan Houlihan
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Poetry
by Bill Zavatsky
First Gestures
by Julia Spicher Kasdorf
From Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?
by Kenneth Koch
From The Read-Aloud Handbook
by Jim Trelease
Gimmicks
by Ron Padgett
How I Teach Poetry in the Schools
by Jack Collom
Serious Play: Reading Poetry with Children
Teaching Poetry: Accurate Songs, or Thinking-in-Poetry
by Eleanor Cook
The Accomplished and the Insufficient: What Readers Should Ask From a Poem
by Thom Ward
The Teacher
by Hilarie Jones
Why Latin Should Still Be Taught in High School
by Christopher Bursk
With Tenure
by David Lehman
You Begin
by Margaret Atwood
Adopt a Poet | Add to Notebook | E-mail to Friend | Print
The Hand  
by Mary Ruefle

The teacher asks a question.
You know the answer, you suspect
you are the only one in the classroom 
who knows the answer, because the person
in question is yourself, and on that 
you are the greatest living authority,
but you don’t raise your hand.
You raise the top of your desk
and take out an apple.
You look out the window.
You don’t raise your hand and there is
some essential beauty in your fingers,
which aren’t even drumming, but lie 
flat and peaceful.
The teacher repeats the question. 
Outside the window, on an overhanging branch,
a robin is ruffling its feathers
and spring is in the air.



Reprinted from Cold Pluto: by permission of Carnegie Mellon University Press © by Mary Ruefle 1996.
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