The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society

In the first of our series of winning poets is Duncan Chambers with his poem The Teachers.

The teachers

They came from third-rate colleges
in the back end of nowhere, waving certificates
that shrank from scrutiny. Just one had been
to Oxford. What mixture of misjudgement
and bad luck landed her with us?

They put books into our hands, policed skirts
and touchlines, clashed the gears of ageing minibuses.
Somehow, there was a chess club, nets, The Insect Play.
They went home to frayed carpets and short commons,
brown envelopes, piles and piles of marking.

In return, we gave them nicknames I can’t repeat,
hung legends round their necks. This one wore tights
and frilly knickers under his trousers. Others were too fond
of the bottle, the changing rooms, the thwack of cane
on flesh. Some of these things were true.

They went out like spent bulbs or drifted from our orbits
as we grew older. A few clung on until retirement,
handed a bunch of roses by the Head Girl
and played out by the second form recorder group.
I hope they got to see Armenia’s ancient churches

or sunrise over Sydney Harbour, but I doubt it.
No-one remembers them now but walkers
who see their names on benches, a village in Botswana;
and all those who ever, as the whistle blew or lights
came up, heard, for the first time in their lives, applause.

Duncan Chambers lives in York. He has had work published in magazines including The Rialto, Magma and The North. He won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize in 2018 and his pamphlet Sleeping Through the Moon Landing (4Word Press) appeared in 2020. He is still working on his debut collection.