Boulder Valley School District: Monarch Student Captures A Community's Experience Through Poetry

Press release from the Boulder Valley School District:

January 30, 2022

Special Note: The Boulder Valley School District has worked to protect students from media interview requests, because we know that school acts as a safe, stable environment for students following the significant trauma they have experienced. We only spoke to this student after she independently agreed to publish her poem about her experience.

While the magnitude and impact of the Marshall Fire remains truly unfathomable, Monarch High School ninth-grader Maren Holecek somehow found the words to capture the experience she and her neighbors lived through on Dec. 30, 2021.

She says the phrases that eventually became her poem, “ashes and snow,” came to her as the tragedy unfolded.

Holecek, however, says the day started like so many others.

“It was so unexpected,” she explained. “We were just coming out of Christmas and it was the holiday season and then all the sudden…”

She and some of her family had ventured to Boulder that morning and while they were on the road, they spotted the first signs of trouble.

“It was a windy day. We were already concerned about the wind. There was wood flying through the air, when we were driving,” Holecek recalled. “Then we saw this small smoke plume. It was just this tiny plume of smoke and we thought – oh, they’ll have it under control in no time.”

A short time later, the scene was completely different.

“We had to drive into the smoke to get home and it was getting thicker and thicker,” Holecek said. “We were at an intersection and there was ash blowing against the window and you could barely see across the intersection.”

They were one of the last few cars to make it through the intersection before they closed the road. As soon as they got home, they knew they only had minutes to grab a few things.

“It was this rush to pack. It was this surreal feeling, because you don’t plan to evacuate. I just kept thinking, ‘why haven’t I thought this through?’” Holecek said with a laugh. “I think through a lot of different situations, but I never pictured what I would pack. What I would grab, when I have little time to get everything that is important to me.”

She, of course, grabbed some clothes, toiletries and a pillow.

“I had these visions of us being refugees in a shelter, like post-apocalyptic stuff,” Holecek said. “It came down to looking around my room and thinking, what is something that I can’t replace.”

Thankfully, she and her family were able to escape safely. They went to her grandmother's home, where they, like many others from their neighborhood, watched television coverage as the fire raged on.

“We all had that shared feeling of watching our homes burn on TV,” Holecek said. “We all went to bed that night thinking that our houses were gone, because it looked a lot bigger on TV than it actually was. We all felt grief.”

The next day, as the sun rose and the snow began to fall – people began to try to piece together the true impact of the tragedy.

“It was texting people, trying to figure out whose houses were okay,” Holecek explained.

Eventually, she and her family received great news – their home had been spared.

“My street did burn, but it got a lot closer to some of my friends’ houses. One of my friends did lose her house,” Holecek said. “I felt so bad for that person, because I wanted to help them, but now they feel singled out.”

At one point in the poem, she shares a feeling that so many in the community are continuing to struggle with, knowing that more than 1,000 of their friends and neighbors weren’t so lucky.

i don’t know how to separate the tears of my friends from my own,
can’t decide whether to be guilty or glad.

She says that has been one of the hardest parts about going back to school. Each of her classmates has been impacted in completely different ways.

i see their ghosts in the charred foundations,
feel their heat in the crumbled black that cakes the soles of my shoes;
watch as smoke shades the sky
and ashes fall with snow like some sickening poetry.

The ghostly images from the poem, as well as the images of snow and ash come from her first visit back to her home, after the fire.

“It was a couple days later that I actually went to the neighborhood and it was snowing and it was kind of this weird space. You were looking at things you recognized, but it was different. The snow was kind of covering things up, so I kind of just wanted to capture that feeling.”

“I’m trying to understand more about how they were impacted and how they have changed,” Holecek said.

Ultimately, she says that it is crucial that the community work to support each other, because only they truly understand what each other has been through.

“It was a community thing,” Holecek said. “It wasn’t just houses that burned. It was the neighborhood. It was childhood places and memories.”

That is why Holecek is glad that her poem reached and helped a lot of people. The City of Louisville published it and it was shared on their and BVSD’s social media channels earlier this month.

“It was nice to know I helped people,” Holecek said. “I was able to validate my feelings and other people’s experiences.”

While she never wants to live through something like this again, she hopes that her writing will continue to have the same effect on others.

“Poetry is one of the truest forms of communication and emotion,” Holecek said. “I’m hoping I can continue to write poetry that resonates with people.”

Here is Holecek's poem in its entirety:

ashes and snow
january 2, 2022
by maren holecek

this fire is carnivorous, savage;
it tears through walls and windows and precious memories
in a fast-moving wave of smoke and flame.

its shadow twists and dances in the reflection of my irises,
singing the hoarse words of destruction in an eerie tone as i
watch my tomorrows singe and smolder in the smoke of uncertainty.

how can this be… how must we understand this,
how in this flame-tattered afterworld can we come to accept it?

these smoke-shrouded hours melt together
like the desiccated frames of our abandoned cars,
too-loud voices in microphones colliding in a perverted imitation of regular life—
i find myself staring, in the darkened shades of nightfall
into the flames i cannot erase from my vision.

i see their ghosts in the charred foundations,
feel their heat in the crumbled black that cakes the soles of my shoes;
watch as smoke shades the sky
and ashes fall with snow like some sickening poetry.

is this relief? i ask myself between the bones of my neighbors’ homes,
i wonder again inside the smoky room in which my books have kept their pages—
i imagine feeling safe, feeling contained and feeling intact,
and i cannot picture the world as it was before.

i don’t know how to separate the tears of my friends from my own,
can’t decide whether to be guilty or glad.
i feel as if i am still watching the news in helplessness,
only now i watch those i love struggle
in a today that i cannot understand.

there is some relief in knowing, i decide,
that none of us are alone in this—
that whether we are consumed with grief or guilt or gratitude,
we are not alone.

as we try to reconcile the brightness of snow with the darkness of ash,
we offer our houses and our clothes and our time
to our friends and our community.
the beauty of humanity is such
that its true strength is found in the ashes,
our deepest compassion unfurling in vivid green from this alien expanse of scorched earth.

i won’t pretend to see an easy end to this pain,
a sunrise emerging to shed light on the mountains.
we are still struggling to find a reprieve in the depth of this long night,
but there is one thing i know to be true:
however many hours before the sun finally rises,
we will be the source of light for each other.
for how beautiful is a sky full of stars?

This press release was produced by the Boulder Valley School District. The views expressed here are the author’s own.