In Light of a Young Woman’s Death

What life comes to,
I thought when I was young,
is dying or hiding,
surviving on borrowed
eclipses of joy,
the darkness momentary but
a brief religious ecstasy
for any wayward girl or boy.
 
I’ve since lived long enough to know
there may be life out in the light,
as bright and scorching as it is
to those who don’t become the rays,
the less-than-straight and all
that’s in-between. To write a verse that plays
with what I’d like to write about
is hardly possible. Too deep the wound,
it makes me rage and so forget
about scansion, and rhyme, and all
the other tools of artistic reason.
 
I did not know her well enough to write
a eulogy, of course, and wish I didn’t know
her name. Nor names of those who’ve slung  
faeces at her blue, white,  
and pink tombstone. How can I not meet hate
with hate, the middling classes of ordinary
human filth, the commenters
on message boards debating what she did
to earn her boneyard place,  
refusing even dignity in death
to someone’s martyred girl.
 
The monsters dressed  
like mothers, clerks, when really what vibrates
their souls is children’s pain and graves.