Margaret writes about her poem: "This piece was a long time coming, and after many revisions, recordings, and rewordings, it has come together. "
It All Amounts to Silence
by Margaret Slate
Eleventh Grade, People's Academy
Morristown, VT
I walk a lonely road, full of lovely black dresses
And black parades with marching bands playing too-sad songs
All full of all too-big words, sung all too loudly just
Amounting to silence.
I’m no hero, just a person paying my rent
To live in this not-so-fair world full of
Not-so-nice people that shout too-loud speeches that only end up
Amounting to silence
So after years of built-up lies, memories and complaints
And old cobwebs and coffin-nails forced in too hard,
Boards hammered unrelentingly again and again, it’s all just sitting there,
Amounting to silence
Because I ignored it far too long,
So that it grew and grew while I pretended it wasn’t there,
So that by the time I opened my eyes to face that harsh reality there was
Nothing but silence
It’s that too well-known silence of too-deep buried and
Too-far rotten to know what it might have been
Before I condemned it in its grave for forever and the rest of time to
Nothing but silence
And in the end nothing that’s left over matters really
Because through the parades and funerals and too-long nights
And too-short mornings, there was nothing at all in this too-old and too-young world,
Nothing but silence.
Nothing but my silence, and the silence of those like me, filled with shouts that were never heard,
Tears that were never cried or cried in the dark, because this world
Never deserved anything from us but our too-quiet voices instead of our too-loud personalities,
So we gave it our silence.
Just once, could someone just listen to our too-quiet voices and steal a glimpse of all our
Too-loud personalities that everyone seems to shove into the dark instead of letting surface and grow
And take a breath in this too-bright and too-fast world, so we don't have to end up,
Amounting to silence
