Just a boy

A dusty curiosity led me this summer to comb my memories, a local graveyard, and the records of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections for information about John. I knew him when I was ten, as I looked at him across the aisle of our fourth grade class. I heard about him again 26 years later, at a time when I was pregnant with my first child. The disturbing news that spring was of John's murder in prison. How did he go from the schoolyards of Salk to an early burial in a plot called Blessed Martin? This is what I am working out in a serious of poems, haikus to be exact, that I've shared only with my tenacious, caring writers' group. I will share. Promise.