[좋은가을영시69]September, The First Day Of School by Howard Nemerov

 

 

 

오늘은 새학년이 시작하는 날입니다.

여름방학동안 가족과 함께 신나게 잘 보내다가

새로 산 옷을 입고, 신발을 신고,

새로 장만한 학용품으로 채워진 새 가방을 등에 매고

새로 배정된 선생님과, 오래된 친구들을 다시 만날 생각에

설레이는 가슴으로 힘차게 학교로 향하는 날입니다.

 

하지만 그 등교가 생전 처음인 아이에게는

그 새로운 세상이 두렵지만,

새로운 그 세상이 얼마나 재미있고, 근사한 곳이라는 것을

알면 좋겠습니다.

 

 

 

  September, The First Day Of School

  9월, 새학년 첫날   하워드 네베로브

by Howard Nemerov

 

I

My child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave; he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind me how
I cried before that door a life ago.
I may have had a hard time letting go.

 

 

Each fall the children must endure together
What every child also endures alone:
Learning the alphabet, the integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That worlds invisible and visible

 

 

Bow down before it, as in Joseph's dream
The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down
Before the dreaming of a little boy.
That dream got him such hatred of his brothers
As cost the greater part of life to mend,
And yet great kindness came of it in the end.

 

 

II

A school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings are but one,
As from the alphabet come Shakespeare's Plays,
As from the integers comes Euler's Law,
As from the whole, inseperably, the lives,

 

The shrunken lives that have not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.
But may they be. My child has disappeared
Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live
To see his coming forth, a life away,
I know my hope, but do not know its form

 

Nor hope to know it. May the fathers he finds
Among his teachers have a care of him
More than his father could. How that will look
I do not know, I do not need to know.
Even our tears belong to ritual.
But may great kindness come of it in the end.