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THE BELLS
Private Notes
Private Notes
Notes
The Bells
Age 14-15, Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, 1958-1960
-- This is one poem, in an autobiographical series of poems, I posted here at WriteSpike. Go to my stories section for others. They are in chronological order. --
The bells were our prison
deep, penetrating
they rang to the furthest edges
of the campus
and spoke of obligations and lost time
The bells rang early for breakfast
then in a series for chapel -
lunch was announced by the bells
and sports and afternoon classes
and dinner, check-in and lights-out
and the same bells counted out the hours
all during the night
The bells seemed alive
like a stern parent
always chiding us to hurry
to do our homework
to not let the moment slip by
Each of us found a way of escaping -
mine was to stay up late
when the hourly ringing
did not have the same sting
as it did during the day
Students passed along stories of others
who were locked in a struggle with time
like the guy who once a month
threw his clock so hard against the wall
that it exploded into springs and gears
When vacations began
we worked quickly to eradicate
the imprint of the bells -
within minutes of arriving in Boston
we bribed winos
to buy us pints of whiskey
so we could let the alcohol wash away
our memories of routine -
only a few hours from school
now safely on a train to New York
we were quite drunk
and the sound of the bells
had lost their meaning
Yet back at school, week after week,
we wondered if we could survive;
we whispered among ourselves that
some of us might not make it
and then all of a sudden
one of us fell
Toward the end of my second year
my good friend John
was no longer in school
no one would tell us what had happened
his room was cleaned out
he no longer appeared on lists
in classes he had attended
no teacher ever mentioned his name
The whispers among us
went on for days
but soon even they died down
yet I knew more than most -
On a warm spring day
I had gone to visit him
I looked in through his cracked door
"Oh, it's you, Doble," he said
he was standing in his underwear
holding a BB pistol
Unable to move for a moment,
I watched him take careful aim
at an object on his desk -
methodically, BB after BB,
he shot away the crystal,
the hands
and then the face
of his electric alarm clock
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The bells were our prison deep, penetrating they rang to the furthest edges of the campus and spoke of obligations and lost time
I feel this so heavily, this was a nice portion of my college experience, except we didn't have a bell ringing for each class, but we did have one that rang hour, and the well that rang for you in your prison deep, was my smartphone's time when it was time to go to class as I sat in my room. -
What a story Rick.
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Great one Rick! Do you have any memories written down from before, or do you write the stories as you remember them now?
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For some reason, before I wrote all of these, I did a basic outline of stories that I wanted to write about sometime. Then I had a hip operation and when I was recovering all these stories kind of came to me in poetic form.
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I read your comment again and to answer more directly. I had not written any notes about these memories until a few years ago BUT I thought a lot about each incident. One reason I finally wrote poems about them was that I wanted to write them while I still had a clear memory.
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This is a very interesting take on the school experience and how it affects others. Great job!
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I believe that school teaches about time, scheduling, and time management more than any other subject. But this aspect is never really acknowledged.
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Hi David -- Yes, it really, really happened and this guy at the end, a best friend John, was now a non-person. It was like Soviet Russia where no teacher would talk about what had happened or even admit something had happened.