lifting words from paper

In high school
my teacher believed
that a life
was best understood
through poetry.
My teacher loved poetry.
I did not like poetry. 
I did not know 
how to love words
or otherwise.
And I could not
imagine words enough 
to make my world 
any better. 
But, I did like her. 
I compared her
to sunsets and music. 
Her favourite piece-
If by Rudyard Kipling
fed anger and angst
into starved souls
for many students,
mostly because
our particular cohort
was filled 
with scientists and carpenters,
mathematicians and athletes-
so English class as a rule
existed outside
their practical minds. 
If could not exist without then.
Poetry was an abstract maze.
Impenetrable. 
And inescapable.
Kipling and high school
expected us to delay 
our gratification,
to live up to expectations,
and 
to slow down enough to notice.
Rudyard wanted us 
to wait,
and to be lied to,
and not to look too good,
and be skeptics of truth
and our friends,
and not to cry
or hold friends close,
and to
start over,
again and
again and 
again 
and
never breathe a pained word of it. 
And then,
in the end,
accept that others 
will blame you
for their same
misfortune. 
English class
became too much
with all of the if this
and if that.
Even if 
I could break 
with habit,
I understood inference
quite well
and the message
was that
even if I suffered
nothing would be
learned from it.
And likely,
when I am
most broken
someone will likely say
if  you'd only done
things differently
then ...