hEY GUYS WELCOME BACK TO SCHOOL!! Quick announcement before the actual content: we’d love to feature more student work in this segment, so please please please don’t hesitate to send in your short stories and poems to stploy@edu.kis.ac.th 🙂
The grandfather clock stood,
As it always had,
In the widest corner of the room.

It has been there for
Seventy three hundred days,
Never failing to count each passing second.

tick-tick-tick-tock,
Resonating from,
Beneath the smooth face of the clock.

My mother is crying,
My father is dying.
Yet the clock is loudest.

There is much to salvage,
Before the dust coats us all,
In our wretched, savage grief.

Suspended in air,
I see everything fall before it does.
tick-tick-tick-tock

My mother crumples,
The lines under her eyes digging deep
Into the tender, bruised skin.

The room is stiller
Than it has ever, ever been
In the past two decades.

I pull a shroud over the remains
Of my mother’s heart,
And bury it while i’m sane.

And like the grandfather clock
That ceaselessly ticks, year after year after year
In the widest corner of the room,

We stand a little taller
And we withstand time, push through the deadlock,
Not unlike the polished oak-wood grandfather clock.