To honor the University’s Senior-Class-Poet contestants and to commemorate National Poetry Month, the Library is publishing contestants’ poems on Falvey’s blog. The Library also has created posters for the contestants’ poems, which are displayed throughout the first floor.

Each spring semester, all seniors are encouraged to enter the Senior-Class-Poet Contest. The Department of English will announce the 2013 Senior-Class Poet later this semester.

…………  …Child

………by Alyssa Moudis

I did not think that this could happen

to someone as nice as you.

I remember shaking in the Church

As your pretty white coffin

Carried you down the aisle.

With purple flowers placed on top,

And I remembered that was your favorite color.

I never thought a funeral could be beautiful.

The altar was filled with so many flowers.

A big photo of you stood up there

But I can’t remember where.

My eyes kept returning to the white coffin.

Forever a nineteen year old,

Two months before twenty,

You will never suffer aging,

But I know you wanted kids,

And that was the part of you taken first.

With tightened fists of tissues I listened,

To the music and to the voices,

You were so loved, so admired.

And today, two of your pictures

Hang above my head, near my pillow,

While I lay across navy blue sheets.

They do not face me.

I have to look behind me,

As we do to see any memory.

Now I drive past your house in my car

And remember, driving, another thing

You won’t do again.  I wonder what

Your mother’s doing as I pass by.  And I try

To picture her, picture how it must feel

To lose a child.

A Senior-Class-Poet Contestant, Alyssa says “Poetry became my favorite area of writing when I quickly learned it is the only other place for me besides my home where I can make my own rules and create my own structure. It provides a freedom for my thoughts whether or not the words are just for me or to be seen by others. It helps me express what I cannot say logically. In poetry it’s okay to be a mess and it’s okay to not be perfect.”

Alyssa Moudis is an English major and GWS minor from Manhasset, N.Y.