Year of writing 78. When nobody you know has died.

1/19/2012


I asked kids to write an elegy awhile back, and we are finishing up the altars in class to go along with those poems that honor the dead.  Every year, I have kids who (thank goodness) don't have anybody to write about, they have never experienced the death of someone close to them.  This usually means that they write about a pet, or someone famous.  The more poetically adventurous kids will sometimes ask: "what if I have somebody in my life who passed away, but I never knew them?"  I always say to this: "that already sounds like a poem - go for it."  Most times, this leads to a somewhat poetic list of questions that the child would have liked to ask the person who is no longer here.  Sometimes it's deeper than that.  This is one of those times.

I hear him speak of you
My father so strong and so brave
He loses his mind thinking of things he could do
To try and avenge you
Anger masks his pain
But he knows there is no one he can blame
He wishes he could have met you
I do too
All that I know are stories told to me
Those horrible stories of your gruesome death
Besides that I know nothing
The question that always bothers me is
Who were you?
When people ask me about my grandparents
I can say something about each one but not when it comes to you
I can only tell them what people tell me
How you died
That is what frustrates me most
I hate it when that is all people tell me
Yet that is all that I can say
You were shot in the back
Mistaken for someone else
A perfect stranger
Nothing but a breathing body with a beating heart
A stranger whose blood I carry

whose blood stained some street

somewhere 

I wonder if I visited that street, would my back hurt

would I flinch, just a little

would I have a better story to tell 

of you.

Keep in mind, this student is 12.  We've already seen what I was writing at 12:  http://djmistergardner.blogspot.com/2012/03/year-of-writing-64-cow.html    It's a little different.  I love that this kid, over all, just wants to honor this man who is nothing but a bullet wound to her.  I hope she finds him somewhere.