"--But I have seen at a distance--looking to
The right, as one walks eastward, where the road rises between
Two fields making a hill--the school house, daughter of the hill,
In a field of flax, in a sixth year when the flax is blue;
And I have seen in the same distance the children singing
In the school room: ‘In heaven’s name,’ they sing, ‘can you, perhaps,
Impart to me some power to enable me to bear this force
Emerging from my heart.’ Or they cry out, ‘Help me! Help me!’
Or they whisper: ‘I wish you were dead.’ ‘I wish you were alive.’

….And on the school room floor something is
Coming to pass at long last. The teacher, neither a man
Nor a woman, turns to the window, and looks left down the hill,
Seeing the boy at the road’s edge, who has seen and heard, rise
From where he was sitting with his question (‘Mother, O Mother!
If I run faster is the way shorter?’ The mother thinks a little,
And then she says, ‘No, dear.’)…”

Allen Grossman, “Flax”