Classroom Windows

Classroom Windows

I can’t remember it word for word.
Not from preface to epilogue and all
points in between, but I know

you would have smiled or maybe
cried; torn out the page and
pinned it to your cluttered dresser.

That poem from your last yearbook
with the glossy yellow cover that you
never held in your celestial hands.

How I wish on every star there is,
that I could recall that one about the rain
spattered window by a word smitten

schoolboy of no more than sixteen.
The one about tiny blobs of rain that
wept all the way down the sodden

classroom window; about how one
might join another and hold on for
the bumpy ride, only to part at some

unforeseen juncture to weep alone.
While others would make it all the way
home together in their slow union, but

mostly I remember the line at the end
about the ones that rolled all the way
down alone—crying by themselves.

©️Orion Foote, 2022