here i sat mesmerized by the way the tip of my teacher’s slightly curled tongue pressed against her upper front incisors as her raspy voice wrapped itself lingeringly around the L’s.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
It was an otherwise ordinary day in my second year of high school at the old Molo campus of the University of the Philippines in the Visayas. Our English literature teacher had directed us to the page in our thick Anthology of English Literature that contained Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”
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