-From the Hugo A. Dubuque School-

The black

Rubber snow boots with lever-like clips

Running upward where the child

Tucks the pant's legs in,

Finds the snuggest notch,

Threads the clip through

And locks it down, squealed

From their soles across the corridors.

The coolest kids

Walked the drenched marble floors,

Their boots unclipped, wide-open,

Exposing the rubbery lick of their tongues,

The boot-sides flapping

Like the wings of vampire bats.

Miss Pollard

Of the 5th grade classroom

Informed us one morning that Sandra

Had gone to Heaven.

I looked toward the vacant desk for conformation.

My Uncle Frank came to get me after I threw-up.

Miss Pollard called my mother who didn’t drive.

So my Mother called my Aunt Lee who didn’t drive

Who called Cousin Edith, too young to drive

To fetch her father, my uncle Frank who drove a Plymouth,

Who was in his shop on South Main Street,

Around the corner from his house

On King Philip Street, southend of Fall River.

My father was on the road selling booze

To every bar and restaurant from Buzzards Bay

To Provincetown, rendering him unavailable.

Uncle Frank was a cobbler,—

Surgeon to the riven shoes of the working-class.

Half the little finger of his left hand was gone,

Ripped off by a polishing wheel

Spinning across the leather, making it shine,

The effect always satisfying his customers.

A dangerous row of wheels of varying

Widths and textures spun

In a furious threat across the heavy lathe,

To my recollection, the size of a battleship.

This dark morning, Frank Toni pressed

The big black button on the lathe's control panel

Starting the wheels in motion,

The drive-belt screeching as it must have

When the polishing wheel with his name on it

Spun to eat his finger years before.

Now he was called upon to shut

The whirling lathe down,

Hang the "I'll Be Back SOON" sign on the door,

Lock-up

And fetch his pale young nephew

Sitting in the dank, narrow "Nurse's Office"

On the other side of town

Who learned of grief that day. 

This poem is written in memory of the girl,

Struck down by the bloodless lick of leukemia at ten years of age 

Who quietly sat at her desk one row to my right

And three desks forward, who never done nothin'

To God or its minions.
But who am I to philosophize such disgrace? 

                                                                          Quequechan