2 Poems for Bruce Probyn Head Teacher of Significant S.A. Schools

The Morning after the Night you Left
For Bruce Probyn, educator
The morning after the night you left,
revealed a mist thick in its swollen silence.
The earth wept in the grayness.
It was as though the moistened molecules,
were trying to find the contours and shapes of our lives.
That was mostly all that was different
The sun still found a way through to us
And the poplars and the ilex glistened
As the girls filled lawns and walkways
in their blue of new beginnings.
Hands were still raised in prayer.
A girl’s voice filled the Mary Jagger with
We will never walk alone
And the Egyptian geese honked their love call
unashamedly from the chapel turret.
Voices still swelled and thinned in corridors;
the breath rhythm of a school,
bells rang for exits and entrances.
Some were just aware of the echoes of their footsteps,
and of the empty parking bay.
True your ghost was there
walking through the minutes of our hours,
but we shushed you away for we were larger now,
A fountain filling the emptiness
with our new found confidence.
For you had humoured us into ourselves
untensed us into our beings
and common-sensed our humanity

That was the nascent difference
on the morning after the night you left.

The Head of great schools
Beneath the mountain somewhere we would meet,
clouds billowing the greenness, the sea near.
His life an illustrious teaching career,
I his priest, our world of girls, the elite.
The bonhomie of chat, an inner cloud
Rising in him with little outward fear.
Delight in dance of days, allowed no shroud
in him, and all he brought us, love came near.

Upon his bed he lay, energy sapped,
His rugby legs and reach diminished.
The easy chats, inclusive smile now wrapped.
The family hours beating to finish…

That which flowed in him flows beyond him, on
In him a true humanity has been won.