Thoughts on wandering in a graveyard by Sophie Davey-Adam, JAGS, Year 13
have been walking still in search of a place to rest, having been lost for long enough, but every step presents the same view, watched right back with neutral curiosity. A fork in the path jolts my mind back from the dead, requiring me to make a deci- sion only difficult for its inconsequentiality. I step left, waver right, wobble inelegantly on one foot, before managing to steady myself, embarrassed of the enemy my mind has made of my body. The absurdity of humiliation before an audience that is not really an audience, but a keen presence none- theless, compels my head to lower, like that of a disgraced child with crumbs around its mouth, turning my attention back to the beaming grass and a dim brass button lodged in its flanks. Glad for the distraction from my cruel, amused specta- tors, I dip to pick it up and catch a little dirt under my nails. There is surely a bench somewhere near - my brazen footsteps resume - but I’m not sure I’m ever making it out of this graveyard. ◎
After a while, I have to sit down. The grass is al- ways so lovely in graveyards, nurtured silently by death, and the thick green blades ripple pleasantly in April’s breeze, but it feels a little wrong to sit anywhere on the ground: that sense of being on top of someone else. You might have thought, in all my wanderings, that I would have come across a bench - I’ve been here for a while now, circling grey shark fin headstones, padding slowly along a solemnly winding dirt-gravel path, not daring to let my gaze linger on any inscription too long lest my eyes prove too loud, too disruptive in the still, hushed garden. Everyone else here is so good at keeping quiet - I half feel as though if I were to issue a sudden yell, I would somehow break the spell, and one hundred thousand others would join me, as though the dust never really settled in their lungs. And the heresy too, the profane desire to brush, only brush, my fingers into the mossy grooves in the stone, to make the words names. I
Riches by Eddie Wesson, Year 13 The balance so delicately kept, And timelessly preserved, resources kidnapped, The Earth is tempest-swept, Arrogance with which black veins are pierced,
The black gold of which they consist, The relentless power of the egoist,
Earth the black tar sullies, The scientists, their studies. Greenwash: the public eases.
CREATIVE WRITING
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THE ALLEYNIAN 713
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