I HAVE started to post poems on the doorway leading into my classroom. There is a new poem posted each week, so that on Monday mornings when students are entering my class, they are forced to read a poem, forced to confront and appreciate literature even before entering the classroom. Of course, I take into consideration that young people are usually busy with a thousand different things to get done, and their attention to literature is something that can be fleeting. So, for these reasons, the poems are always short, packed with beauty, and usually speak of something that the students may find interesting. One week, I even included work from an InstaPoet named Atticus.

There is a range of poems that speak to the teenage experience and I try my best to represent these experiences in my choice of poetry. At the beginning of the semester I tacked up a poem on birth and beginnings, and after a week filled with assignments, I posted a poem about persevering and succeeding. Week after week, that is how it goes, me trying to make students read poetry by gauging how they feel and trying to establish what they would react to, as a group, each week.

However, recently, for the first time, I posted a poem because of my own feelings. It is hard to be surrounded by teenagers every single day and not think of your own experiences as a teenager. The poem I found, “Dirty Face,” by American poet, Shel Silverstein, highlighted that very sensation of nostalgia for the days of wild and free abandonment, long before the arrival of “adulting,” which swiped away the teenage years and replaced it with worry and bills and disillusionment. I write about this poem here because I know so many other adults, like myself, who have forgotten the freedom and wonder of being young, which is the central theme of “Dirty Face.”

“Where did you get such a dirty face, / My darling dirty-faced child?” These are the opening lines of the poem, which offers us the interrogatory adult voice questioning the child. Strange and delightful how these two lines offer us a mental picture immediately of the adult, a long shadow, bending over to speak to the child. The child then responds.

“I got it [the dirty face] from crawling in the dirt / And biting two buttons off Jeremy’s shirt,” says the child. “I got it from chewing the roots of a rose / And digging for clams in the yard with my nose.” Observe the natural environment in which the child-speaker positions him/herself. The child’s world is nature, with its risks and rewards. Yes, to our adult minds the exaggeration used here to impart children playing in nature is worrying – but to our quickly-vanishing child-minds, that we no longer use, isn’t playing in the mud something that once brought us great joy? Who never lay face down in the grass as a child? Who never sucked nectar from the red flowers that grew on the thorny plants? Who never wallowed in the sand on the seashore? As children, we were all one with the nature. As adults, we have drifted farther and farther away from it.

“I got it [the dirty face] from peeking into a dark cave / And painting myself like a Navajo brave.” These lines obviously speak to the ability of children to create characters and to roleplay, something that most adults fail to tap into once they have passed a certain age. It is the poet’s way of continuing to unearth the nostalgia of childhood in his adult readers, forcing us all to confront the fact that along with childhood, we have lost so many other things, including the ability to imagine, to create, to believe – in ourselves and beyond – and to be unable to shield ourselves with the kind of lack of self-awareness that children seem naturally gifted with.

Even the lines of the poem which seem highly exaggerated or unreal contain important information regarding the child/adult dissonance that makes up the individual’s life. The poet, when he writes of the child’s face becoming dirty from, “…signing my name in cement with my chin,” or “chewing the roots of a rose,” there is definitely an element of exaggeration here that may face some oppression or lack of comprehension from the mind of the adult who might be reading the poem. However, I believe that is exactly what the poet wants. It is a calculated decision the poet is making in order to force the reader to confront all that has been lost in childhood, in a similar way, I suppose, that I try to force my students to read literature by tacking a poem on to my door each week. The poet seems to be suggesting that even the adult’s inability to accept some of the more “out-there” lines in his poem is a signifier of the impact the loss of childhood has on the adult – in the way he/she is unable to immediately understand or appreciate the absurd or the outlandish, which, with children, are often wholeheartedly and immediately accepted without question.

“Dirty Face” is a wonderful poem that every adult should read so that he/she can experience the brief, but wondrous, nostalgia that is the memory of a childhood, half-forgotten, as seen when the child-speaker concludes his/her speech by saying to the adult that he/she got the dirty face from all the wild things that have been listed in the poem thus far, as well as, “…ice cream and wrestling and tears / And from having more fun than you’ve had in years.”