Okay, folks: summer break is officially over, at least in Bryan County. Schools started back up this Wednesday, which means that dozens of students in Richmond Hill and Pembroke will be commuting every week, Monday through Friday, to their schools, blasting moody pop music through their earbuds as they traverse through freezing cold hallways to reach their English classes on time after they spent X amount of attempts to open their lockers to put away their stuff to no avail.

Or at least that’s what I did in high school.

(Ugh, I know I’m probably just projecting; do kids even need lockers nowadays? They all most likely carry tablets or Chromebooks, plus AI crap on their phones like ChatGPT that kills both the environment and people’s brain cells.)

To celebrate the start of the school year, and as a tribute to high schoolers taking AP English Literature this year (my favorite high school class back in the day), here are two poems for this week for readers to dissect, analyze, and write a 3-4 page paper on--double-spaced and with MLA citations, of course.

I felt a funeral, in my Brain, Emily Dickinson 

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro Kept treading - treading - till it seemed That Sense was breaking through And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum Kept beating - beating - till I thought My mind was going numb And then I heard them lift a Box And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again, Then Space - began to toll, As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race, Wrecked, solitary, here And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing - then - Ozymandias Percy Bysshe Shelley I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Andrea Gutierrez is the managing editor of the Bryan County News.