After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting I wrote this poem. It is the opening poem in my 2014 book The Rip of Gales. I have not “covered” subsequent (or other) “mass shooting events.” The subject is too hard to broach.
The plenitude of deaths, and especially deaths by violent means and deaths by murder, makes me say, with T.S. Eliot, “I should be glad of another death.”
My spirit continues to mourn Marielle Franco, who died by apparent assassination five days ago. I did not know her, but the continuing tributes pour in on social media. My sympathetic poem feels hardly adequate; but it would break me to revisit.
I just looked at the lines I wrote upon occasion of Daniel Pearl’s murder. He was but one year younger than me; there were some similarities in background, about which I wrote somewhere (mainly that we both had a journalism class in high school), and so I felt a kinship of sorts. The news cycle churns up other “events,” my life has continued, and I can’t understand why I have had some 15+ years beyond his allotment. There is no sense to it. (Beyond the obvious that poets tend to lead secluded, sedentary lives, comparatively speaking.)
Students who survived the Stoneman Douglas High School Shooting in Parkland, Florida, (along with other survivors and bereaved) have been agitating for changes in gun laws. We old cannot but look with admiration on the young, on these young.
The plenitude of deaths, and especially deaths by violent means and deaths by murder, makes me say, with T.S. Eliot, “I should be glad of another death.”
My spirit continues to mourn Marielle Franco, who died by apparent assassination five days ago. I did not know her, but the continuing tributes pour in on social media. My sympathetic poem feels hardly adequate; but it would break me to revisit.
I just looked at the lines I wrote upon occasion of Daniel Pearl’s murder. He was but one year younger than me; there were some similarities in background, about which I wrote somewhere (mainly that we both had a journalism class in high school), and so I felt a kinship of sorts. The news cycle churns up other “events,” my life has continued, and I can’t understand why I have had some 15+ years beyond his allotment. There is no sense to it. (Beyond the obvious that poets tend to lead secluded, sedentary lives, comparatively speaking.)
Students who survived the Stoneman Douglas High School Shooting in Parkland, Florida, (along with other survivors and bereaved) have been agitating for changes in gun laws. We old cannot but look with admiration on the young, on these young.
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