Albert Kapikian: The Foolish Professor (A Double Sonnet)

Now looking up, taking roll, I hear them:
My own two voices (my own forked tongue.)
Am I taking roll or taking names? Starting to lecture
I begin to face them down (my two false choices).

I know there is so little I can convey
yet so much upon which I can insist—
There is the face that can profess
(But that face is false, that face I should resist) 

Yet that face is my form of redress
(Damn all those teachers who taught me what,
not how, to think—!)
I worked hard to get here. So now I get to stress
what I think is right, what I know is wrong. 

(Let them gorge themselves on what I think) 

Let them learn to memorize my song.

My other face is a face to confess
that they cannot find (with a map anyway) 

what I cannot tell them how to possess—
that all I really am
is my syllabus, my opening words
to the class, my ability to inspire others
to the life I have not had—
that I am here to let them go into the places
I cannot map because I cannot, because I could not, 

because I did not learn
how to go—

For now I choose to rule (and play the fool)
As a professor there is nothing I do not know.

This poem appeared in VOLUME 26 2017/2018 of CEAMAG, JOURNAL OF THE COLLEGE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION MIDDLE-ATLANTIC GROUP