A Poem for Mrs. McCoy

Kathryn Jones

November 1, 2022

I remember standing in a hallway

outside high school Senior English class,

nervous on the day we each recited 

Hamlet’s soliloquy to Mrs. McCoy.

Her first name was Dorothy, but no one

dared call her that out of respect. 

She stood taller than football players

with her high heels and teased hair,

listening to each one of us quote the Bard, 

cocking her head, savoring every word. 

She loved language, especially poetry 

by Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Burns, Blake,

teaching us to see beauty in every line. 

When I asked her to put Dante’s Divine Comedy

on our reading list, she broke into a wide smile.

Of all the teachers, she was one who set me

on a path of seeking truth, a path of words.

What a poem she was in all our lives – 

shape, voice, harmony lifting off the page, 

alighting on young hearts, embedding in memory. 

Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas. Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.