He Died
The words stilled every heart in the room.
When she was called out of class
by two friends
I had thought nothing of it.
When she came back in,
to retrieve her books,
I did not look up.
I was engrossed in a sketch
of a girl
alone
in a dark forest,
and did not see the pain
till those two words
fell
broken,
from her lips,
as if they had also
died.
“He died.”
She was not a friend,
I knew her name, her voice, her friends,
but no more.
She was not a friend,
but the pain in her voice
brought tears to my eyes.
I still did not see her face,
but her words echoed in my ears.
“He died.”
As she left again,
her friends followed,
sharing her grief,
as sobs floated back to us
through the closing door.
A stunned silence.
Uncertain, unreal.
The fraility of mortality
painfully recalled.
“He died.”
(10th grade, 01/29/1993, 2:00pm)
Comments on He Died
That was pretty much how it happened.
I never found out who it was who’d died, or what he was to
that girl.
She left the room, and I wrote the poem.
I can’t decide if I like the line breaks in this. On one
hand, they sort of evoke the disjointed, sudden distruption we all felt. On the
other, I may have gone a little overboard on a few of them. Eh. That’s the fun
with free verse. Easy to do, hard to do well, and very subjective.
I like seeing into people’s houses at night, when the lights
are on. I’m not saying I go creeping up to windows or anything, but just as
you’re driving or walking past, you can look through the open curtains and see
little slices of people’s lives, and remember that those houses are full of
people you may never meet, who have lives that have nothing to do with you. It
puts things into perspective.
That day in class was sort of the dark side of that reality
voyeurism. Here was loss and pain that had nothing to do with me, but I hurt
because she was hurting. Yet I could set the hurt aside, whereas for her the
wound would linger until the pain became so much a part of her that she didn’t
notice it much anymore.
I hadn’t lost anyone myself yet, at that age. I have since.
And people will tell you that the pain goes away, that the hurt stops with
time. I don’t think it does. I think you just get used to it.
Image by Stuart Mills, FreeDigitalPhotos.net
