Community College
When I ask them about the rate of metal oxidation
how long it takes silver rings to tarnish
the two students who made it to class
say they don’t have silver jewelry
and I see their bare fingers, wrists, ears.
I ask them how they study.
They say they memorize.
I have to show them over and over again
how to use their overpriced calculators
from the college bookstore.
When I ask my students if they read poetry
they say they don’t. But later one repeats
a Bible verse, engraved in her mind
unlike the name of an element from its symbol
how to calculate the charge of an atom.
A retired chemist I know wrote a book
about his childhood in the segregated South
a rural community scratching out their living
starved for generations
of education in American schools
of ancestral African knowledge
believed a family had sickened of hoodoo
oblivious to a fertilizer spill a month before.
I donate that book to the college library
talk about it in chemistry class
afterwards, ask my students if they know about
what I had learned in school and college:
a native son, a diary, a tree in Brooklyn.