The things I'd love to learn

Teach me to be a lawyer

Not like the warriors that were suitable for yester-wars

Teach me to fight differently

Not with the papers that are stacked up in the walls

Teach me to love my writing and reach for what it's not yet

Gently like the dripping of cream and everything sweet

Teach me to cherish my solitude

Please don’t tell me tell I have failed

Nor give up on me because you can

Teach me to be here

Available and learning

Teach me to candidly cherish my weakness and the sight of things that are yet to be learned

Tell me that I am strong, that you believe

Teach me that I can believe too

Don’t use hostility on me

Hostility kills students and dreams

It kills difference and diversity

It makes us shrink our creativity

But do not be silent, it only means you are absent

Teach me to be the way I am

But tell me the truth

Not the things that others have said

Teach me the beauty of arguments and of taking sides

But tell me that I can have a side of my own too

Teach me to hold unto my faith in the world

Teach me to stay up late at night because I enjoy the eroticism of studying

Don’t scare me with failing because there is no such thing

Teach me to listen, but tell me I have the right to disagree

Look on my dream as equally valid

Validate me, but be honest too, I am at your feet

Don’t crush me with the trophies that mean nothing to me

Teach me that its more important to learn than to compete

Don’t make me cry on your watch

Don’t make me regret my questioning

Teach me that heroes should not be clones of each other

And not every gifting is marked in terms of red and blue

Make this training ordinary as opposed to herculean

Because the extraordinaries are really in owning the simpler things

Teach me to be a lawyer like me

Not a clone of yourself or others

Inspire me to return to you

Teach me to enjoy the depths of not-knowing enough

And make it pleasurable to reach out

Teach me to love myself

Tell me that I can win

Tell me you believe

So that I can believe too

The roads have brought us here

Please don’t get in the way, teach me

Please don’t be a scare, teach me

These are things I’d love to learn

The things I can’t say to myself, yet.