catapult magazine

Resurrection Education: Part 1

by MJ Gallagher

My parents championed
Alternative education,
Keeping us at home
While the buses rolled by.
We kept time
With the green digital clock
Punched into the face of the wall.
Or sometimes we didn’t keep it at all.

If you ask them now
Why they did it
You’ll see the same flicker
They’ve always had
In their eyes.
They wanted to teach their children
How to read music, how to find constellations
And how to make letters add up to something.

But mostly, they wanted to teach their children
That a man rose up from the dead.