Poem: "To Be a Teacher"

To be a teacher, you must stand in the fires of the present. You must hold up your honesty like a signal light. Your music must be swing and smooth jazz and the lonesome blues. You must make the mountains a struggle to climb. Your heart must be the lake that lets in every river and stream. Your thoughts must be like spears and flashlights and nets and shovels and clubs and stars rising in the darkness. Your lessons must have wings to carry the heaviest weights. You must speak the words of both frost and summer, as well as those that unfasten hearts. You must test the tightrope each hour.