When I was teaching regularly I often thought of Tom Wayman's poem "Did I Miss Anything?" which I heard Tom read at the Denman Island Writers Festival (a cozy little gathering that you might want to check out). Remembering the poem, which talks of angels descending from heaven, often got me past my first impulse which was to pull my hair, stamp my feet, and say "aaargh" when habitually absent students expected me to catch them up in five minutes before class.

In the 70s Wayman was known as a working man's poet because he often wrote about actual work rather than what were then considered loftier concerns, and my brother Tom featured Wayman in an hilarious comic strip in which almost every word was the f-word. Wayman loved the strip and paid my brother for the original.

Here's the poem and if you miss it this time, don't expect me to introduce it again.