A poet teaches

River silt still sticks to the windowsills. The flood waters receded more than a month ago but we are living with their legacy every day. The “river sculptor” has carved a new landscape. We work around it, trying to recover a sense of what we lost, knowing the reality of the new life, the post-flood life, will be different.

A formerly dark entryway will be brightened with sunny yellow walls and a hard tile floor, defiant against the next onslaught. The floor itself will mimic river stone—what else would serve to honor the surge of ’06?

Slowly, a new surface reveals itself—re-thought structures, bare perimeters once framed by hemlocks, a missing boat. Our lives, too, are re-thought. What matters?

Words still matter. The words uttered in thanks to a neighbor, the words forgotten, the words said in anger to a husband or a child. The words written, or not written, and the words etched in stone, like the survivor of our flood, the carved “Welcome” stone that stood firm while its garden structure floated away.

We resent the time this deluge took from us. We miss the lazy times, the pool time, the time to work with words and images, the time with friends.

A few memorable times have worked their way past our enslavement to the flood damage. They are made more memorable by the contrast they present to sheetrock and mud.

One of the jewels left unmuddied is the First Fridays poetry series at the Narrowsburg library. Curated by the indomitable Laura Moran, herself a flood victim, the series brings world-class performance poetry artists together with local poets for a night of enlightened entertainment.

Taylor Mali filled the library on the first Friday in August. I recruited my contingent of teenagers, along with my construction-dusty mate, to accompany me. After a day of floor-scraping and wall-building, they were oddly cooperative. Poetry as an antidote to physical labor. I like it!

Mali was surprising on many levels. His name evokes Africa and I had imagined a muscular black man, a veteran of Def Poetry Jam. But the man who took command of us for a full hour of insight and humour and love and grief was a soft white boy with lanky hair and a sweet, powerful voice.

Before he became a full-time poet, he was a teacher—who was proud to be a teacher. When asked once, by a well-paid lawyer of his generation, “Honestly, Taylor, what do you make?” Mali went on a 30-second diatribe that started off, “I make kids wonder, question, apologize….” and ended with, “I make a difference, now, what about you?”

Now, as a performance poet, Mali inspires others to teach. He has counted 140 people who have pledged their intention to teach, as a result of his influence. He is a one-man antidote to the insidious saying, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” He is a man who honors his place in the world, and receives honor in return.

I was grateful that my teenaged children and their friend were in Mali’s audience that night. Grateful that they could feel his passion about the world, his sense of hope in the face of tragic circumstance and his abundant humor.

After a summer spent working in our mud-caked house, I was grateful to see them laugh, and to laugh myself.

I never expected a life-changing transformation to happen at the library that night, but who knows? By the end of the evening, two more teachers pledged to Mali, and if they go on to teach others with his brand of energy and love, even flood waters won’t be able to stop them.