Tonight’s featured poet is yet another one of my former students — because, frankly, I love being able to showcase these amazing people here, people who were talented and accomplished before I’d ever met them and who have gone on to continue doing exceptional things. I was lucky to have the chance to work with them when they were in high school, and I’m fortunate still that they’ve chosen to stay in touch.

Hannah Rosenthal is an officer in the U.S. Army, serving her second tour right now overseas. Even when she was in ninth grade, her writing and personality and work ethic demonstrated a willingness to serve and a selflessness that was unusual among other, more typical students in her age group. She won numerous writing awards as a student and then distinguished herself further her senior year by being, if I’m not mistaken, the first girl from our school to be accepted to West Point, the school where she matriculated.

***

Never Let Me Go

Days last twenty-four hours in the tradition
we clench so tightly our fists mottle gray
from unswayed overuse. We say the sky is blue
because that beautiful color lowers the massive
panorama close enough for us to see, but still too high
to touch. We don wings with hearts of stone

and the mechanics of birds, but birds with stones
for souls and pebbles in their blood, propelling tradition
closer and closer to the stars we can’t even count, their high
shine and brilliant composure blinding us to the gray
puddle of grit they actually are. For centuries massive
mysteries have mystified and choked us until we are blue

in the face. We fail to realize that our oceans have no blue
left in them, only the sick grease of oil washing up on the stones
along the tarred seashores, pulling the massive
net of ozone slowly to the ground. This is our tradition,
and we cannot let it go. Our appetite for the itchy gray
of sophisticated ruin goes unparalleled amongst the high

ranks of nature and order and whatever higher
calling we choose to believe in or disregard. The blue
dyes of nature bleed slowly into an overly sanitized gray
conjecture, like watching a picture-perfect girl turn to stone.
Imagine photographs with all the color and tradition
washed out, the road open to men with massive

guns and only their carnality left inside. The massive
implications of our ways lead us blind into a high
stakes game of spin the time-bomb, like a kiss of tradition
horribly misplaced. Today, we see the sky as an ocean of blue
filled with dreams. Today will never last forever. The stone
castles will crumble into dust, the same gritty texture of gray

as the stars we honor at night. Cormac McCarthy saw the world gray
with ash, from sunrise to sunset, if the sun could overcome the massive
hole in its fiery heart. When the brightest star turns to stone,
we might finally see the world out of its high
rolling clothes, dressed down to basic faded blue,
the original color of health and peace. Sadly, tradition

barrels on. Blue skies always give way to gray misery because
we have forever played the stakes too massive, too high
for any other tradition to overcome what is set in stone.