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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cotwMUY9Imo

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                “How old are you?” I asked him,

                “Eleven…? Or…”

                “Twelve.” He answers, definitively,

                With tears in his eyes and a knit jaw.

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                Twelve years old, dark-skinned, wearing a stained,

                Red hoodie, sitting on a split round,

                In the rain,

                Beside a cold and empty firepit.

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                I see the wind as it passes through the trees;

                I see the overcast, hanging

                Like the broken ends of an umbrella,

                Moisture, collecting beneath layered musk and undergrowth.

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                He wipes his eyes, as the world collects around him

                And as every thing in his proximity

                Announces a state

                Of mourning.

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                Twelve years old, and now without a mother:

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                Angry, because the world keeps on turning,

                And his has now been broken. Angry, until the moment

                Somebody can empathize enough, understand,

                So that he might have leave to cry.

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                As I watch him, my eyes well;

                I feel myself feeling as he does

                And I try to pull as much from his shoulders

                As it’s within me, then, to carry.

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                                The irony,

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Is that I learn more from such a child

                           Then I could ever hope to teach.  

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