The Seed You Planted

You planted a seed in the third grade
that I did not know was a seed—
a question, a comment, a pointing to the window
to show me where the answer might proceed.

I carried it without knowing for years
until the day it broke open in my life—
a seed you had forgotten planting long ago,
flowering long past the original strife.

This is the mystery of teaching:
the growth happens past the planting time,
past the semester and the school year and the knowing—
it flowers in the life, in the later rhyme.
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