Sunday, April 1, marked the start of National Poetry Month, an annual celebration the Academy of American Poets first introduced in 1996, according to poets.org. To commemorate National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world, the King Street Chronicle will publish one poem every school day throughout April.
In the foreign city, behind a cathedral,
a child stitches the wall together with Band-Aids
stretched across the fissures,
tiny ladders thrusting in crooked curves,
their rungs peeling at white edges.
“Why’d you do it?” a stranger stops and asks, a net of apples
slung over a shoulder, as if he carries laundry, indifferent
to the bruising. The voice is a bird flung into glass.
The man needs no answer, but speaks to feel his tongue, having dreamt
the night before of the sounds of the horror—having felt, three miles away,
the tremble of the wall, heard its weeping like a brittle rib-crack.
“I wanted to save it,” the girl whispers,
stepping off a wooden box pressed to the wall’s base.
“I wanted to stop its bleeding.”
– Mae Harkins, Staff Writer
Featured Image by Mae Harkins ’20