CHILDREN’S HOUR
H. W. Bryce
Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower, (lour)
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations
That is known as the children’s hour.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Between the dawn of the day
And the end of the work hours,
Come the stresses and the strains
In the guise of the children’s hour.
Come the pros and the cons,
The tossing of bric-a-bracs and insults anon
With reference to garter belts and gutter snipes
In such array as to self empower.
The children hurl across the great divide
Such poisoned slurs in figurative form, and
Then from the teacher’s throne they hide,
And never suffer rebuke or, smitten, hide.
For this bombast a release is
And freedom from the pressures of
The heavy burdens of childhood democracy,
And the volume transcends each over each.
Then, of a sudden in children’s hour,
Two voices shout the same thing
Across the children’s hour room, and
A consensus raises its smiling head
Above the din and silence intervenes.
And all the children stand in awe, as statues.
The children look, each to each, dumbfounded.
Until they realize just what they had done,
What great, unique acconplishment they had
Just achieved…agreement. They had raised
The level of the children’s hour. They
Fill the holy air with shouts,
Surprise, and glee. They celebrate
Without constraint, and the teacher just smiles
As left side of room claps and cheers
And right-side echoes that. But Jane jumps
Up and waves her arms in the air and
Dances in place, tears filling her eyes.
Then, spontaneous, both sides pour into
That sacred play space, like two rivers
Converging, the red river and the blue,
Doing the happy dance as one congregation.
John crosses that rubicon and embraces the
Jubilant, dancing Jane, and they hug dance.
Many hands are shaken, many a bear hug
Embraced, all in celebration of this unusual
Feat that had just ended the endless childish
Bickering and found the practice of
Conversation therapy. They had just
Ended the practice of onversion therapy.
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Well done, said the happy teacher,
And hoped the truce would hold, for
Democracy of childhood demands
The children get along and play nice.
And thus ended the day’s children’s hour.
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