I’m the teacher.
Are they my teachees?
Are they students
if they don’t study?
Do they study me?
Naming anything
or anyone
isn’t easy,
and sometimes
we need to change
the labels
when we realize
what we’ve said.
We can call a spade
a spade
when it is a spade.
We used to have homeless.
Now they’re unhoused.
We used to have hunger.
Now we’re food challenged,
calorie deprived.
We used to wage wars
to kill.
Now we initiate
interventions
to restore equilibrium
with collateral damage.
We can’t change words
fast enough
to hide the truth.

I’ll keep trying
to learn enough
to teach
because
there’s so much to learn.