Hai! for those who don’t know, I do poetry! if you want to check out some of my poems, Go to Poetry.com and search for Ace Coward, and I should come up! here’s one of my most recent poems called “We Should Not”
The morning starts with yellow boxes packed,
With sharpened pencils and a double-knotted shoe,
With cereal bowls and stories left half-tracked,
And skies of ordinary, quiet blue.
The yellow bus rolls down the curving street,
With laughter bouncing off the vinyl seats,
With soccer scores and gossip light and fleet,
And footsteps rushing into schoolhouse beats.
The lockers slam like metal drums of spring,
The hallway hums with youth and heavy bags,
The bell rings out a normal, daily ring,
While time moves on and nothing yet lags.
Then comes the sound that language cannot hold,
A sharp, concussive fracture in the hall,
A story written fast and dark and cold,
Before the silence drops upon them all.
The desks become a fortress in the dark,
With tight huddles of breath and wide-eyed dread,
Where every heartbeat leaves a frantic mark,
And teachers shield the living from the dead.
Beneath the wood, a child counts the floor,
And wraps a best friend’s fingers in their own,
While boots step down outside the classroom door,
And turn a sanctuary to a zone.
The sirens wreathe the block in flashing red,
The yellow tape goes up to guard the stone,
And parents run with terror in their tread,
To wait for names they may not hear alone.
A nation looks upon the breaking screen,
And offers words that vanish in the air,
A cycle spinning in a tragic scene,
Of empty desks and grief too deep to bear.
The pencils wait beside the notebook page,
The crayons scatter on the checker tile,
A quiet monument of stolen age,
A missing voice, a frozen, sunny smile
Where there should be the smell of crayons, fresh on paper
And all throughout the halls children’s laughter
There is the sharp tang of iron
And, on the floor, a small boy, named ryan
We should not need to teach our children to duck at the sound of thunder
We should not have to send our children to school, scared they might not come back home
We should not have to teach our children to be afraid to learn
We should not have to fear the teachers and the schools that were promised safety
We should not
WE SHOULD NOT.
For every bell that rings across the land,
We ask the question trembling on the tongue:
How long do we let metal force the hand,
And silence out the song that should be sung?
