Newnan High School - Empyrean Yearbook (Newnan, GA)

Page 10 text:

The floors are all polished and shiny brown The windows are finely clear And the clocks all run on time — In an empty school time runs . . . people come inside to sweep and hone and make ready Then teachers move in and clutter their desks with knowledge and textbooks or maybe just sit on them to speak to wise poems or the State Department while they bang their heels and we listen with students (clangs and brains) Time runs . . . For nine months this is the students' world of grey blackboards, generous windows, bent forks, scuffy floors, and textbooks, desks with bubble gum wrappers and pictures of cars carefully drawn on yesterday's algebra homework Time runs . . . And the classrooms breathe and smell of ink and chalk (crushed on the floor by the stool and podium) and of tests freshly mimeographed. Time runs . . . with (football) games — hollering and homecoming — and a senior crying a little because it went by so fast basketball season . . . Christmas holidays . . . tests over all and we worry and laugh and eat our lunch and doodle in the margins of a notebook and wait for the next holiday . . . Time runs . . . and seasons change, leaves have fallen, rain has frozen itself into crystal sleeves on grass and weeds by the sidewalk Until spring and sandals and daffodils It is past time to begin thinking of college applications It is time for a senior class to leave and the juniors to become important and for sophomores to be ignorant still of what it's all about the freshmen grow an inch or two and find out who is who and in which room he lives Time runs . . . school years are short-lived and changing . . . For every year there have been the years before — all the same really, but smiles belong to different people and hems go up or come back down and it's all in this EPHEMERA . . . Time runs until it is time to repolish the floors for our return only to be captured immortal on the pages of a book . . . changing . . . short-lived while time runs . . EPHEMERA 6

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