Sir Adam Beck Secondary School - Lacedaemon Yearbook (London, Ontario Canada)

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TWO POEMS WAR ORPHAN Cringing, crying, craving, crawling, Starved, forgotten child of Hell, Innocence broken by feud of superior minds, Knowing naught but pain and hate, Pure childhood marred by guilt of those Too foolish to realize; too wise to heed. And in a city home, a white child is rocked to sleep, Cradled, clothed, and nourished, Gifted by God, guaranteed a home. The orphan has no home but faith, He often longs for a word of hope, Tonight he may be dead-- Thoughts of death and parting in the twilight Of some quiet era. A knowing smile Between two hearts grown fond, older, Wiser; a scent of earth, of air, of water, A dreadful fear of night, of time itself and A longing for our life, our prime. Of years swallowed up in folly: we die Before the earth yet digests our deeds. The gilded world is but a foil, For our night surely comes: The night comes. BY CAROL ANN OULTRAM

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No is a blackness. Black is as little understood as No, and its completeness is abused by the fools who don ' t even like it, but play with it because it is a new toy. Black is more than a colour, it is a state of mind; and more than an op- posite of white, it is the catharsis of white. Black is absolute absence. And you can ' t see a hole, you can only see the walls of a hole. And you can ' t see black because it isn ' t there. A smudge of truly black paint is a poem in itself, if only because it expresses more than a hundred thousand words--or a hundred essays such as this one. It is one of the most beautiful things in the universe- -it is quiet, infinite. . . it is not. Question mark. I see a large (?) rising out of the audience. Please take it back. You aren ' t ready for (?). A question mark is, like black, and, especially like no, the absence of something, anything. Most of us think of it as the absence of an answer. True, it represents man ' s quest for truth, and that is something- - a most important thing. But what, in four thousand years of civilized thought (filled with question marks) has man learned of truth (question mark, period) He asks but he never answers; so there is a lack, a vacuum: there is black. The question mark is no. No isn ' t statement, it is a question. O my reader (yes ' my reader ' --for while you are here reading this, you are experiencing my mind, and while you are in my mind you are mine), I could, as you have no doubt surmised, go on and on about Nothing. But what I have said should be enough to at least let you see No from a different direction. And if you can ' t see it, it ' s only because it isn ' t there. Please remember that my essay is imperfect. In fact, it is all wrong, and I wish you ' d forget it all right away. But you won ' t because, like me, you don ' t understand no, and you can ' t forget you can ' t negate, you are incapable of remembering black in the place where this essay used to be. All you can do is lay these pages down now and whisper a quiet emphatic No

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PADISHAH HILL he sun poked his head over Padishah Hill and with long, almost lecherous fingers began to remove the cloak of darkness from Liana and the valley in which she lay. One of the fingers found Clayton Seriate leaving his house, on his expedition to the village. Nearby a rabbit shot out of the earth and bounced across the moor. Clayton, otherwise unoccupied, was aware of this and numerous other occurrences to which he would normally have been blind. But, after all, one can ' t return to the norm after an experience like the previous day. It ' s simply impos- sible. Thus he continued down the hill from his home, sublimely aware of things. What experience could push a man to this - to forget his established pattern of life and withdraw out of himself? As many times as he had, to no avail, reviewed the events of the previous day he decided to try just once more. Perhaps in the morning air his motives would be clearer. The day before, Wednesday, had been rather an unorthodox day. Having com- pleted his chores, and with them the morning, he found himself sitting on the porch, as was his custom. While watching the world spin around, Seriate was startled to see a girl climbing his hill- -HIS hill ! Picking HIS flowers ! In the years that he had lived on Padishah Hill he had never seen anyone foolhardy enough to quit the safety of the highway and set foot on Seriate land. Since the death of Thomas Baxter at the hands of Diablo Seriate twenty years ago it seemed that even angels feared to make their way up the hill. But not her! There she was, clearly a hundred yards from the road! As Clayton rose to chase her off, she glanced up and saw him; she hesitated, markedly surprised, then started to- ward him, absolutely unafraid. Toward him ! This was too much. He lept from the porch and scrambled down after her, determined now to break her neck. Yvette Grimoire had finished her Wednesday housecleaning, and it had struck her fancy to wander the moors. When she had seen the young elderly man, his face smothering in a dusty beard, she had been surprised. It was the house that had drawn her off the road and in her haste to examine it, it hadn ' t occurred to her that anyone could live there. She quite liked the design, but was sure that it was the sort that she alone could appreciate. The gentleman had been hurrying down to meet her when his foot caught in a rabbit hole and he had sprawled out like a misshapen starfish. His fall had been so utterly ridiculous that she just had to laugh, and so she did. Damn that stupid rabbit ! What a place to put a burrow ! Clayton made a mental note it wouldn ' t be there tomorrow. Looking up he saw the girl laughing. He rose angrily and was preparing to strike her when suddenly, suddenly he realized that she wasn ' t mocking him. She was. . . oh, the idea was there, but what it was exactly couldn ' t be expressed by any words he knew. She was, in any case different from the ugly people of Liana. Still she laughed. - In his rather moted mind ' s eye, he envisioned his fall. It was hardly hilarious he decided, but perhaps it was somewhat comical. In spite of his sore hip and battered ego he was to a degree able to appreciate how someone unconnected with the incident could laugh at it. For perhaps the first time in his entire life, he enjoyed a degree of empathy with another human being. The bearded man got to his feet, raising his fist as if to strike her, and for the first time since her father ' s death, Yvette was afraid. But his yes locked in hers and as he stared, his face softened ever so slightly. Subsequently a look more embarrassment than anything else invaded his eyes, and for a few infinite seconds they stood locked in a visual embrace.