First Story is a charity that promotes creativity in schools. Every week it posts a piece by one of its students. This is “Sadness”, a poem by Robert Marston. It first appeared on the First Story website.
Sadness By Robert Marston
I took Sadness to a boxing match.
He pushed the door open slowly with one finger,
dragging his feet. It sounded like
a snake hissing as it died.
With his face light blue and his clothes faded grey,
his eyes showed that something he’d loved had gone.
Others looked, but ignored him and carried on.
Sadness became sadder, and shrunk a bit.
I sat with him and said, ‘You don’t have to be sad
because you still have a friend.’
He started to smile and shine more brightly
and his light blue face had more color to it
and his clothes beamed brighter too.
When the first match was over
people came and started to talk to him and said,
‘We just looked away because the match was on…’
and Sadness became bright gold and was happy.
