We have become well-familiar with how unpoetic teaching can be. The prevalence, furthered by much recent reform, of a systematic school culture focused on accountability, standardisation, and learnification often renders teaching dehumanised work. This paper theorises a poetics of teaching. We begin considering poetics, focusing on figurative language as a concept at the core of the art. Figurative language offers a model for figurative education, in which teachers treat their practice as metaphors treat language, a move that opens education towards complexity and ambiguity. Further, we consider what makes poetry matter to people: resonance, or the relational aspects of writing. We explore resonance in conversation with philosophies of relationality, theorising how poetic teaching necessitates an engagement with the relational. We find what may be required to teach poetically is risk-taking, risks all the more beautiful for the ways they engage teachers and students as complex persons doing meaningful work.