The Emerald

Thread Two: The Missing Child

(In Poetry & Letters)


We Never Say Goodbye

Getting lost in hallways
bumping into
or dodging open lockers
girls darting
this a way and that a way

and checking behind you every second of your way
of your journey to a class
of your journey to another box in time
another location to a new home
of bowed heads before superiors
of flashes of black-watch plaid
sailing and manuevering
around constant blurs

i wonder (as I watch you escape)
why we never collide
into things
into people
into girl-ghosts
why your footsteps are soft and unintrusive
like my gray cat's
green eyes searching
sitting politely looking out
on a window sill
why even the eyes dodge me
when i stand frozen
before headlights
why we feel always alone
in a crowd


i, with my grief slung onto me
and heavy like a haggard backpack,
and, you
with your graceful gait
leaping as a gazelle does
when danger inspires to nimbleness

no, we have never stumbled
or even fallen
racing and dashing
looking forward and back
behind our right shoulders
knowing every secret place
every stairwell
every wall to slip past-
our short cut to sanity

once you stopped...
do you remember?
dead cold walls
reflecting the shine of
dim lights
of afterschool hours waning away

all the words unspoken between us shot out
from within your eyes all at once
i wanted to inquire why you ran
i knew why i did
you couldn't say to anyone
that it was your last day

all we could manage was

"so, how are you?"

Then a nod
which meant "fine."

We could have started a secret race
a secret tribe of survivors
a forgery of lost things
emblazoned into our very bones
a lost race, perhaps
a binding legacy or anthology
of virgins of time

resigned, we both asked
in our tele-transport:

"so what are we doing here?
now what?"

a gift of the blue emerald
gleaming on the floor before us
the only clue
that we had never spoken
our french first names
our only thing in common
our pleasant and distant gazes
politely hiding behind
rustling window blinds

the brooding eyes of the boy-
visitor stealing past our hallway
asking for a pen
to report on those that we
escaped from
he knew he was safe
in the hall
with us

one last slam of the metal
hinges lunging out
from unforgiving walls
and I did know my place

I was too young to worry
about you
about this longing for a
connection
to make our lostness count
for something

when you whispered,
undaunted by everything &
by everyone swirling around
one last brief respite,

"keep it."


the emerald -
a new sacred trust
and a farewell

the next time
I ever heard about you
you had gone -
missing.





I wanted to write all of the above into a letter to an unknown person. I knew I felt something was off, but I couldn't name it. I couldn't ask her what was wrong, because I didn't know her. So a poem felt right.

At the end of the year, there was a missing space where her photo should have been. I wanted to tell people that. That she should have been there. That she did belong whether it looked that way or not...

They would have thought I was strange. Why should I care? She was older, not one of us, but too young to be idolized by us under-class (men). When a discussion once ensued about who everyone thought should be our "big sister," I suggested her. No, someone said. She's too quiet. Too not outgoing enough. She's just not one of the popular girls. The future lawyer...The future actress...the future doctor...the future "everything."

A wall flower of sorts...a way side flower, like Queen Anne's Lace, beautiful but isolated and forgotten...


I knew what they meant. They all idolized the most popular girls. Girls whose families and ancestors all attended the convent and then subsquent academy. Girls in cliques or leadership...she shied away as I did. In my mind, I said I would keep her as a secret idol.

I would show everyone that she counted, too. Eventually, I forgot everything. She had either disappeared or left to go to another school. No reason was ever given.

http://www.elyrics.net/read/h/hanson-lyrics/yearbook-lyrics.html See: (Hanson)lyrics...

We all dressed like college prep high-school girls. The Irish girls all fit in, and if you weren't Irish, you had to be preppy and out-going and articulate. At that time, I was shy and retiring and hid in the library or in the portry where I felt protected by after-school staff. I switched to idolizing Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson and other then female - role models to me.

About ten years ago, they asked us in a newsletter if anyone had ever heard of her whereabouts. They wanted to compile an anthology of students past and present.

Once again, I remembered our (last?) meeting. She knew how to hide and was never in the hall like everyone else. She didn't speak a lot.

She reminded me of someone else in my class who kept away from cliques and kept her head buried in romance novels all the time...Johanna Lindsey or something...and she had been new. Later, I found out she had been adopted. Which was a new topic to a lot of us, although I had read "Freckled and Fourteen" when I was in gradeschool about a girl who looks into her parents' secret file cabinet and finds out she was adopted. I remember asking what "adopted" meant. I had just come to the USA, and I didn't recognize the word.

These past few weeks, I have felt her in different things around me. Once when "Alicia" looked a certain way on the program, "The Good Wife," a look that said a lot without a word, in the Estee Lauder ad yesterday, in the eyes and possibly the hair of the girl pictured, in the brown hair and gaze of my small niece at three years of age, in the way a baby kitten sidled up against the bushes as she stopped to greet me while I was trying to leave my friend's house before anyone knew I was out and about, and in the Vanity Fair photo of the Princess Stephanie, and finally upon my sleep-deprived face I saw staring back at me in the mirror this morning.

Then I had worried some time ago about a crank caller who would call all the girls' homes and play Spanish music and harass them. I wondered secretly if he had done something to her or to any of them. If he had a deep-seated need to punish or take away these girls away? I put that fear away as soon as it arose. Did someone kill her and treat her like an object instead of as a person? Like a piece of steak meat?

I am remembered of the poem to a little child.

"Marguerite, are you grieving?/Over golden grove unleaving?"

These are the unanswered questions you find when you are younger. Someday, you will know. Someday, "you will live some distant day into the answer." Or "the answers are blowing in the wind." All the songs and poems say...

I wanted to ask all these questions and more. I guess I never did anything with all the words and thoughts colliding within me. And this might be a way to resolve all of this, slowly, process it?

I ran into her again in the title of a children's grieving camp. In the book of a romance novel where she is a central character among the French people, a heroine.
Maybe she is not totally lost?

At least, not to me.

She probably never will be.