March 3rd, 2009

• Ash Conway, Grade 12
• Poetry
• 2009

In all seventeen of our natural years
Had never seen such pain.
To think that 3 o'clock the day before she high-fived him,
He saw him laughing in his seat.
But at 7am on March the third, his life ended. To us.
We stood around the greeting space and watched as one by one we took the shock.
A girl he left, sixty-five or more years away,
Not as harsh a rock as the one who sat beside him and laughed in class
Or the hand that clapped his at 3 o'clock
Or the thought that we knew the name
For all of his seventeen natural years.
The schoolgirls weren't the worst of sounds; it's in the skull, the thought
That you'll never see him return to this spot.
The sight of rain made us think there must be something wrong with the world,
The greyest day in all the drought:
Tremours of the human cries, and the screaming wind blocked half the sound.