School Reunion and Day of Remembrance, March 18th, 2017
Suzanne Morris
January 7, 2024
“They have always had roses here,”
says the man walking ahead of me
toward the big entrance doors.
And I wonder what “always” means:
if it means, since that day it happened,
or, even before that day?
American Beauty reds,
they rise in resplendence,
blessed by the sun’s embrace,
banks of them,
resurrected from ruins,
offspring of this Holy Ground.
There are enough fair blooms,
quivering with life,
to call forth from memory, one by one,
the face of every innocent victim
lost here, then some:
of every person who
lost someone dear
and thought beauty could
never abide here again.
Inside, the crowd swells;
friends reunite, hug, tease each other
as old schoolmates will
some were not even born
when it happened
but what happened
was born into them,
is part of who they are.
Wearing name tags and
holding programs and lunch tickets
paid for in advance
they mingle with spirits
outside auditorium doors
as if this were just an ordinary
school reunion
as if any reunion here
could ever be ordinary.
One white-headed man stands apart,
leaning on a cane,
gazing through the noisy crowd
studying some point in the distance.
For him, it is that day again
when everything changed.
At 3:17 p.m., a silence is kept
to hear the chimes ring:
Eighty years from
the moment it happened.
Note: on March 18th ,1937, a gas pipeline
exploded under the London School in East Texas,
killing several hundred children and half the
faculty. Eventually, the school was rebuilt on
the original site.
Suzanne Morris’ poems have appeared in numerous online journals and anthologies. Aftermath, a survivor’s tale of the London School tragedy (SFA Press, 2016), was her eighth published novel. Ms. Morris makes her home in Cherokee County, Texas.
