Alle Benchoff

Shore Country Day School

Grade 8

Night

Sonnet

Unlucky cat black fills the silent sky

The color of absolute emptiness

Freezing cold air lets out a subtle cry

From the house comes one light, a friendliness

One world goes to sleep, another one wakes

Owl flies, 'coon steals, bat blends with silent sky

And the moon lives alone and his heart breaks

He has no escape he can't even die

He watches the light, the one from the house

And this one light is the last one awake

The light is me, awake late like a mouse

These hours, like thin glass, I'm about to break

The night is empty, yet the night is full.

Fight through the night and you will see the light

Gareth Buhl

Waring School

Grade 12

Looking in at an Old Friend’s Wake

I fumble at my tie knot

Wavering between

Respectful and breathless.

Aware that I know no one here

Except the widow

And the boys,

I wait quietly in line

And bite my fingernails.

In the corpse-room (what is it called?)

Relatives stand as islands,

I tread water,

Visitor, voyeur,

Between them

Alone.

Do they feel throttled also

By charcoal tiles

Waves of slate curtains

And grey landscapes?

I heard drowning is peaceful—

This is not.

I wish her clumsy wishes,

Wait watery and useless

Choked at the closed casket, uncertain.

There’s a bible and knee-rests

But I’m not a catholic.  

I don’t pray.

A look over my shoulder: countless

In line await approach.

So I pass on.

Neither of the boys cry,

In their eyes is not him but

Bloated slack face and

Slate hands, briny

Battered washed up blue

Bruised and brackish.

Light and distant,

I can silently slip into sun

And air.

I do.

(Take a story with me,

Leave a body behind)

Inside they still tread water.

Jordie Cornfield

Waring School

Grade 8

sleepy, gold cliches

You’re a tired cliche

A red rose or

A yellow sun

That’s dripping

In broken promises

And jumped-to

Conclusions.

You’re a love song

That belt-outs something like

‘You’re the only reason I wrote this song,

When you’re here, nothing’s wrong’

Something must be wrong, though

If the artist is depending on

Another person for

Their happiness and satisfaction.

Or a RomCom movie where

Girl likes boy, boy likes another girl

Who’s blonde or rich or both

And by the end of the movie,

Miraculously,

The original awkward girl who had

A make-over halfway

Through the movie

And the cool jock whose main goal in life

Is a basketball scholarship to UCLA

are together.

You’re a tired cliche

That I’m sick of hearing

On and on and on.

You’re the girl wearing pink

Or the boy wearing blue

You’re everything everyone hates

But they don’t know anything else.

Their heads too small,

Or their pants too tight

Somehow the oxygen

Can’t reach the part of their

Brain that’s groping for the button

That tells them to

Run, run, run.

But my head is the right size

And my dress is floral and pretty.

So I can see

That you’re a tired cliche

You’re a diamond in the rough

Or something weird like that.

It’s a small world,

So many people like you.

Ah, to be young and foolish

That’s a cliche too.

It’s kind of sad

But,

Only if you’re old,

An old soul, you’d know

All that glitters is not gold.

Elizabeth Patrick

Waring School

Grade 12

Oranges

At christmas time the box arrives,

same as last year same as next.

The cheap wood, with one dimensional colors;

Orange and Green. Together, simple depictions of

“Florida’s Freshest.” Telling us what we already know.

The box alerts me to my carelessness,

Reminds me of my grandmother, far away.

She thinks of me frequently,

I think of her many fewer days.

When we rip open the box my siblings and I,

Some green paper strips fall to the floor.

They fight over strawberry candy, scarce in fake grass packaging.

An Orange is enough for me.

Griffin Wells

Waring School

Grade 10

The Biggest Question Ever

My brother and I are shuddering in front of the space heater,

wiping the Carmex stains off of the Scholastic: One Thousand

Questions About Dinosaurs book so we can

leaf thru and find the page where there are big letters

that tell us when the Earth will be engulfed by the sun,

and life as we know it will cease to exist.

At night we sweat and stick our fingernails into the drywall

thinking about…how it will finally feel

for our 5 billion year old skin to Touch!

the Sun! time to replace our bodies with camera metal

and apply that intergalactic SPF twenty zillion.

Uncle Jeff flicks the mala beads hanging in front of his dashboard

while we repeat “Wenus!” and tug our elbows and laugh until our tailbones hurt.

But I stop laughing when I catch a grimace

from that unswollen sun, sweetening

the apricot tree in his front yard.

Raphael Clark

Shore Country Day School

Grade 8

Over Liquid Glass

Over swells and troughs, fly, the surface

A pane of glass, slicing sheer speed,

Hands both raw and sliced with salt.

On ropes above the drink.

Lean out, keep it straight,

Pull in the sheets

Double speed,

Straight we

Sail.