School For The Dead

When the bell rings
at close of day, none of them will go home. 

When the next morning bell 
rings, they’ll still be sitting there.

You don’t assign homework to the dead.
You don’t expect them to answer questions today

you posed the night before.
Every moment for the dead is the only moment 

and it’s a myth that they are eager
to talk to us anyway.

All you can really do is lecture them
as they sit, dulled

and neither willing nor unwilling
to hear you. No one has a clue

about what it takes to graduate.
Not the teachers, not the administration,

certainly not the dead themselves,
and they couldn’t care less.

If they were to move on it would amuse
and astonish them at least as much as it would us.

So: why take such a job?  Why teach 
at a school for the dead?  Because

though it’s a remote chance, a miracle 
might happen — but mostly because the dead

can’t die before your eyes from gunshots
or abuse or disease. Because the worst

that can happen there
is nothing at all.