E: Final Exam

Final Exam

Where tension is palpable in muted halls
heads bow over desks and exhausted children
jump through the final hoops, nose-balance
the last dead fish for their exacting keepers.
Beneath the racing surface of their minds,
beneath the numbing litany of atomic weights,
the cryptic rhymes of irrelevant dead,
freedom murmurs its insistent promise.

Outside the long summer beckons them,
the insistent surf tugs at their hearts.
Soon at last they will fling into the summer,
cast off the tokens of their long captivity:
the badges of spurious rank, the desexing drab
of khaki and muddy tartan; soon, at last,
they will escape to a world bright with liberty
where all decisions are only theirs.

What if they knew, the children whose faces
are gaunt and grim over the scratched tables,
that the freedom that glitters outside the gates
is merely another mirage, another promise
we have failed to keep? What if they knew
that the chains we have been forging will bind them
all their lives to patterns not of their desire,
that we have warped their desire and made it ours?