Sara Little
Bio
Writer and high school English teacher seeking to empower and inspire young creatives, especially of the LGBTQIA+ community
Achievements (1)
Stories (36/0)
The Prayer of Khaled Joudeh, Age 9
Upon returning to school after the start of the New Year, I assigned my 10th grade students a reflection project in which they had to choose an image from the New York Times "Year in Pictures - 2023" and write a short poem that conveys the emotions and elements of the photo. I usually complete the assignments alongside my students, especially I am asking them to be vulnerable in their work. So, I began scrolling through the photos posted on the NYT website. When I got to the month of October, the intensity of the images increased exponentially as the majority of the photos were of the brutality of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. One image in particular cut my heart the deepest: A young boy in the Gaza Strip reaching to touch the cold forehead of his 8-month old baby sister as she lay wrapped in a blood-stained shroud. Samar Abu Elouf, an award-winning photojournalist for the New York Times, had taken the photo. She also had spoken to the boy and found out that his baby sister had been killed during an Israeli airstrike that had obliterated the building in which her family was sheltering. In addition to the loss of his sister, the boy's mother, father, and older brother also perished in the attack. As I gazed at the tragic scene, I heard the prayer of the young boy, now an orphan. A prayer and a lullaby wrapped in the salt of his grief.
By Sara Little6 months ago in Poets
Her Last Farewell
Eleanor hated funeral homes. Lonely, loathsome places, in her opinion. She hated the way those places made her feel. The way she shrank under the stern gaze of looming windows. The stale perfume of wilting roses and carnations thickening the chilly parlor air. The hollowing of her stomach every time she approached a casket, that final “good-bye” stuck in her throat like a knot of spiders. And the heavy dread that lurked in the shadowy corners of the overcrowded rooms, a sinister reminder of the inevitable. Eleanor had bid farewell to most of her family, friends, and even a few strangers in rooms not unlike the one in which she now found herself. The furniture, the wallpaper, the flowers, the murmuring crowd, all identical from one to the next. Even the corpses had begun to blur together into the same ambiguous visage. Except for this one. The body that now lay stiffly reposed in the silk-lined coffin was more familiar to her than her own reflection. She had spent sixty-seven years memorizing every angle and curve and twinkling aspect of the man that rested before her. The once brilliant smile of vitality and mischief now winced under permanently closed eyes, and the knotted hands closed over the sunken chest cavity belied their former gentle strength, now a mere gnarl of skin and bone. Her darling Theo. His was the only familiar face to her in the parlor. His, and the woman’s.
By Sara Little9 months ago in Fiction
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