Like Ours

Ninety-two students and three nuns died in a school fire in Chicago on December 1, 1958.

For days, after the fire, we talked aboutOur Lady of the Angels school, how boysAnd girls like us had died in their classrooms.

Miss Anderson said that school, like ours, wasA chimney, and we needed, each of us,To pay attention now, lips zipped and sealed.

They had one unreachable fire escape,Wooden walls and floors like ours, years of waxBuilding rectangular plains of candles.

She said the common corridor we usedWould be impossible with smoke, and weListened, so quiet, already like ghosts.

Their windows, she told us, were tall, their sills,Like ours, twenty-five feet from the pavement,Our fall the same as Catholic children's,

Whose parents paid to keep them safe from schoolsLike ours, where nuns and priests were charactersIn jokes that featured discipline or sex.

Readiness, she said. Remember. And whenThe bell slapped us, a ruler to the wrist,We lurched up like we did for pledge and prayer.

Outside, rain was freezing, weather so badThe alarm seemed real. Like ours, their school dayWas almost over. Like ours, their weekend

Was beginning. "Calmly," she said. "Now go."The sleet slicked the fire escape's iron stepsAnd our uncovered heads until eighteen

Of us, silently descending, broke looseFrom the brick wall, our bodies flung againstA railing that rescued us like firemen.

"Hurry now," she said, "go down," and we did,Assembling like a choir, everybodySinging the same chorus that morning, safe

Until we climbed the main stairs to our roomFrom which, like theirs, no exit existedBut the long, luminous stride into air.