WHEN NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME (football)

The football field house has a new coat of paint.
The field itself sports a brand new logo,
and the cheerleaders wear bright new uniforms.
I roam the sidelines, many years after
my teaching career, looking for familiar faces,
but all I see are teachers I don’t know,
and students who enrolled long after my retirement.
Once I lobbed short quizzes and long term papers
across the academic playing field.
Once I quarterbacked my classes
down field towards graduation,
urging them to push back the surge of ignorance.
There were many championship seasons back then,
times I didn’t spend watching the clock.
Today I walked the sidelines,
a ghost in this former school of mine, along
the sidelines where nobody knows my name.