I wonder if this is what Pompeii was like
in the weeks and months after Vesuvius blew,
ash and broken furniture littering the rooms
where children played, friends laughed, where music
and literature, science and mathematics drifted
like smoke through the open doors and windows.
There are no stone encrusted bodies here, clinging
for dear life, no vacant-eyed dogs begging–only
ghostly cats nesting in the wreckage, peering out
from behind an upturned desk, a charred bookcase,
the art studio floor, no longer on the second story–
but there are voices in these eerie halls,
like those I heard in the stone streets that long ago summer,
voices of teachers and books and bells rising
into the air, mingling with the black dust and the sounds
of bulldozers and backhoes come to bury the past.

Note: They finally leveled the building last week. My friend Elaine took these pictures a few days before the bulldozers arrived. Since I was never allowed near the building, I never got to see my room again after the day of the evacuation, so I am strangely glad to have these. There are several more here, with notes and some descriptions.