Actually, it was a haiku.

I was in the sixth grade. My teacher (wish I could remember her name) gave us an assignment: Write a haiku.

So, I searched my soul. I was being a rather melancholic little kid at that time. I think this was after I had finally successfully shot something with my pellet rifle. Please understand, that I shot many things with my pellet rifle. And I never hit anything, until a little bird fell into the water, lifeless and dead. I went to pick him up, then realized that he was actually d-e-a-d. And I started to cry, and felt awful about what I had done. I held him in my stiff gloves, and carried his limp body back to the shore, and left it there. I realized my mistake.

So, I wrote:
Be a meadowlark
ever so humble
then, die
your soul to crumble

I remember the perplexed look my teacher had. She showed the poem to my mother, to see if “everything was alright” back at home. Well, it wasn’t. But dead birds were the least of our problems.
In 1979, at Scales Elementary in Brentwood TN, there weren’t any precocious kids other than myself.

– Chad