Winter Aconite: Remembering Iris Wathen

The best teacher I ever had died yesterday, and the timing feels a bit strange as she'd been much on my mind these last few days.  I was in her class almost fifty years ago, but I still remember which things she taught us and how she made me feel, which is valued. 

This is a poem I wrote about her some years ago. I'm glad I got to share it with her. 

Aconite

for IW

Were you called Iris for the rainbow goddess

or the stately flower?

Either way your name isn’t apt.

There’s nothing insubstantial about you

you don’t drift through gardens in sapphire silks

and pinstriped scarves. 

Instead you bundle about your business

with diffident squirrel glances,

earthed like the roots of the plant you brought in

to show us one Monday morning

exploring the lure of its petals, its deep-toothed leaves.

Wolfsbane tamed in your capable hands.

Though sometimes there were rainbows

in your classroom.

Refraction through jam jars of water,

a milk bottle chrysalis bursting with ice,

triangular prisms spilling from boxes

like ingots of light

Postscript:

Reading comments about this blog posted on my Facebook, it seems that Miss Wathen was the favourite teacher of quite a few other former pupils too - no surprises there then. And that tadpoles featured quite heavily in people's recollections. I'd forgotten the time the naughtiest boy in the class knocked the bowl of frogspawn from her desk onto the floor.  It was an accident on this occasion, and she didn't shout at him and tell him off as other teachers would have done; she merely asked him to pick it all back up again, ha ha.