StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XI, No. XX

As the authorities told it, the wheelman was a boy,
A fourteen year old teenager driving a silver minivan,
With three passengers, all adults in the back;
When they were done, four victims lay dead,
Five others were bleeding from their wounds.

The weapons of choice, an AK-47 and two handguns,
A 9mm and a .45 caliber if the shell casings are correct;
A driving by shooting into a crowd of people,
Mostly teenagers whose bodies fell in piles,
Panic and chaos followed as the suspects sped away.

The mother of a sixteen year old who fell victim:
"She barely weight 100 pounds, shot in the temple
With an AK-47, her body riddled with senseless bullets";
Part of a cycle of retaliation spawned last week
By suspicions of the petty theft of a gold colored bracelet.

One child was coming back to his grandmother's house
After stopping after a funeral at a friends;
He never returned, he lay bleeding on the streets
Where this extended gang war always continues,
Stripping the neighborhood of all hope for its future.

The young driver, wearing a hooded jacket,
Stood in shackles in the courtroom without remorse,
He had nine previous convictions on various charges
Having been rehabilited by youth services six times
And walking away from them at least two or three.

Someone took a bracelet, unidentified and unknown,
But worthy of another black on black shooting;
The victims had gathered at a funeral at Saint Augustine
The morning of the latest incident and returned there
That evening after the van opened fire on Capitol Street.

I am a member in good standing
In the Grand Church of the Universe,
That great comity of star and planets
On which all the races of humanity reside,
No two the same, none better than any other, 
Arms and legs, hands and consciousness,
One voice before the infinite darkness,
We are here, we are alive, come join us
In our star wrought nekropolis,
Let us make the galaxies sing.

My father-in-law, long dead and ex,
Was a sometimes disagreeable man,
Stuborn and set, but always willing
To help someone out of scrap;
He spoke a jingoist racist rant
From another time, another place,
But, one on one, the color of skin
Never stopped him from doing right;
Like many of his generation,
He was embarrassed by what
He had been taught
And what he repeated
With little meaning or thought.

Years before I was born,
He took his new family down to the river
For a picnic and the water
-- the summers in Sacramento,
Before air conditioning was universal,
Tested the strongest among us;
After lunch, he placed his young daughter
Up upon his strong shoulders
And waded out into the American
Like he had done so many times before.

Step by step from the shallow banks,
Accompanied by his daughter's giggles,
He walked, the slow low summer water
Barely reaching his waist;
As his foot loses traction,
As he slips into the sinkhole,
Father, daughter, future and family
Caught up in the sudden waters:
Father emerges, the child pulled under,
The world shifts for ever more,
Leaving only a yellowed news clipping
To tell us of the man who went before.

Meeting, meetings, all the same,
PowerPoint, PowerPoint, all in line;
Slides to the left of us, graphs to the right,
All the men jockeying to make a last comment.

I am not him (quite obviously),
Nor am I the one who came before,
Although I have forgotten more Greek
Than I have ever hoped to learn.
At best I am an ape (2 arms, 2 legs, no tail)
Well versed in the various literacies,
One who is touched with poetic obsession
And must diverse herself to write prose.
No one touches my feet in great reverence
Or lays flowers at my non-existent altars,
Nor do they write checks to my foundation
For I perform no rituals, interpret no scripture,
And have not forgone many worldly pleasures,
But I am a poet, yours and for those who will come.

As they pass,
Minus various limbs and fingers,
I wonder where we left them,
Iraq, Afghanistan,
Or on the plain of Jars?

This one could be a Civil War Veteran,
That one, a hero from one of the World Wars,
And that one over there a survivor
From some planet we don't have a name for yet.

Life is a series of dyings,
Survive enough
And suddenly you are old,
Save up a dozen,
You need a new line of work;
But a few, three or four,
Will usually take you close to ninety,
After that it's luck, a good genome
And the will to survive.

On the earthlike worlds,
This one on which we survive but barely,
The planets at the end of our telescopic grasp,
All the unknown hopeful worlds as yet unnamed,
Life may be inevitable, wave after wave,
Given oxygen and carbon, water and time;
The only fluke may be in life's absence,
Scourged from the terrestial surface
By asteroid and volcano, science run amok,
An unstable, variable sun, bad genes
Or the wrath of some local gods.

We ourselves, the various homo,
Have fought our way past our many dead ends,
Left our fragment bodies buried rock by rock,
Aunts and uncles, ancient grandparents now gone,
Lost in time, their stories forgotten, their lives tossed aside
In the multiple eddies of seemingly random evolution,
But the species continued, our children grew
Until we infest each home world niche and cranny
And scour the heavens for a post earth alternity
That no one has yet laid claim to.

Uncreated and eternal, the universe exists,
A perfect beingness of star and planet
Extending as far as our machines yet see,
-- Earth, water, fire and air --
A seemingly infinite expanse of inherent potentiality
Subject only to the higher maths,
The demands of physics,
And the ingenuity of the human brain.

Our briefest stars,
So lately risen,
Soon flicker out upon this earth.

Our hopes and dreams,
So brightly burned,
Are ashes adrift the solar wind.

Remember.

The world is a rose,
Darkly lit,
Its petals falling in endless space.

Remember its fragrance
After the flower's spent;
Remember us all and be at peace.