Unseen,
Unknown,
She walks through a sea
of foolish oblivion.
Their selective sight
never betrays knowledge
of her presence.
She does not pass the test
of visibility.
Happy chatter,
pretty faces,
mask a shallow emptiness,
but by flaunting seek to make
nothing into something.
Popularity’s appealing façade beckons.
It entices with a lie of fulfillment
and promises release
from maturity and meaning.

“There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.” Most everyone has heard these words before, I suppose. Indeed the statement has become so familiar to us as to make it hard for us to look deeper to grasp their full meaning. If you think a moment you will soon realize the words, and I am sure most of us would agree that, should it ever come to it, we would be willing to die for our friend. Though we can only hope to be given the courage and constancy to really do it.

As I wander through the lonely graveyard
Where dead men and women serenely sleep
I stop by a headstone, gray, cold, and hard
And speak to a man in the earth so deep
“Hello,” say I, “you who’s dead in the earth.
To where will you go when you leave this place?”
“I do not know.” Came a voice filled with mirth.
“I am at ease here, in my padded space.”
“But,” say I, “do you not want to see light?”
“To leave the earth and see truly, clearly?”
Comes the reply, “It is fine here, just right.
I do not trust in a world above me.”

Not just a song by Pink Floyd.
To me, it’s much more.

I sit contentedly, legs curled under me, my hands wrapped around my

I'm at home with all the home sights, home voices, home tastes and touches. I'm on break. This will be the first time in four years I've managed to be home for Easter, amazingly (Texas and Rome, Italy being my past Easter locations). Our magnolia tree has sprung its soft, white flowers; the peeper frogs have begun singing at night, and the brook across the street is horseback brown. My youngest sisters and I climbed the magnolia tree and visited the brook today. In honor of spring I shed my beard and about half the hair on my head, and as result I hardly recognize myself in the mirror.

"April is the cruellest month" for T. S. Eliot (The Waste Land), but for me it's going to be the calmest. Actually, that's not really true, not with the junior-project deadline approaching in early May. That's when I will find myself in front of all my professors answering their questions about "my" poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins -- you know, the poet I've supposedly studied all semester. So April won't be the calmest month for me. Still, we do get two and a half weeks of break from school. I will at least be at home even if I'm studying Hopkins half the time.

the colors of my childhood
blind me
the pastel balloons and candy coated words
often fly before my eyes.
all of the scraped knees
and soar throats
are nothing compared to the pain I feel now.
reality has reared it's ugly head
you can turn on the news to figure that out.
I just never knew that reality could be so scary
I'm longing for the pastel colors of my childhood

age = 13-16

the fog was dark and dreary
the swordsman rode in fury

in the night light i saw this one
yes, my child i saw this done

the ogre's eyes lit up
when we galloped

for the great battle
of sominearia

age = 4-8