Come Ysabel, walk your halls with me.
Class pictures on the walls
are stories of generations past.
Here is my father, your student,
and my mother.
I am down here
and there are my three brothers.
We have aged,
as have all these smiling youths.
You never seemed to.
So always the same, unchanged.
Simple dignity.
As a youth I blamed you
that I learned no Spanish.
Few of my family and friends did.
And those who spoke it at home
bit their tongues and were silent.
To the rest it was
smugly considered a lesser language
of a lesser people.
Despite this impossible teaching task,
you taught us something real.
Gracious lady,
you scrubbed my racism away
with your model of cultural beauty.
I learned no Spanish,
but I became of your culture.
And I learned from you
to teach with
care for the soul of the student.
In all this gallery of students,
I don't know how many learned Spanish.
But to a person they saw your grace
and none have forgotten you.
You became your lesson modeled.
Your lesson, so subtle that
I recite it today for the first time.