The report made plain that we’d fallen from the top –
a real sock in the gut to the nation.
We told ourselves the next day there was much to learn.
Could parents no longer parent, or teachers teach?
How had the nation put itself at risk?
Thus was inaugurated the Thirty-year Race.
Better yet, call it the Thirty-year Steeplechase.
The track wears out with each bedraggled clop.
The forerunner suffers a herniated disc,
and the water dispensers have left their station.
It goes without saying no end’s in reach
as there is no end, but only another turn,
another bend in that “progress” for which we yearn.
Like Einstein’s curvature of time and space,
it's never checked nor drawn to a halt with a screech,
but sputters along through each manufactured flop.
Funny that we call it education!
Of course, it avails nothing to repeat “tsk tsk!”
But just think, if we all quit now, change would be brisk.
We’d have to forego the scant bread we earn,
commit ourselves to some other occupation
for a time, and who knows if we’d regain our place
after the chaos had come to a stop.
The governor might reprimand us with a speech
outlining the sundry legal points of our breach
of contract, and cops would be there to whisk
us back into the workplace with a broom and mop
and force us at lawpoint to re-begin the churn
and crank them out with nauseating pace –
our callow wards, that is, our young aggregation
whom thirty years have tendered in mute frustration.
But that’s enough. I didn’t mean to preach.
I’d like to say, “We should look this thing in the face!”
but its face is in no pocket that we could frisk.
Its makers hid it in a secret urn.
Perhaps the corpse will someday arise, holler “Pop!”
and, addressing the nation, shout: “We’re still at risk!
Three decades should teach us there’s much to learn
from this race that has taken no one to the top!”