July 2015
My early education, at the hands of Dominicans, informed me of all things possible and impossible right out of a few pages of Plato's Phaedo, set down over four-hundred years before their savior walked the earth. As far as I may wander, I am pulled back to those few tenets: the transitory nature of human existence, the necessity of denial, the tensions of extremes, the hope of the sublime. I live in Tucson with my wife Jane Catherine, a watercolorist, and with our dog, Irish. My more recent work has appeared in The North American Review, The French Literary Review, and others.
The Innocents at Sandy Hook
Nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel,
or what life itself eventually reveals.
No more studies of kindness or courtesy,
not grace or charity, all is needless now.
All is needless now, sky, world, family
grieving for their bundles of purity,
now beyond disgrace, failure, winter streets,
of whatever attacks, and then retreats.
Classrooms emptied of children’s things,
paper and paste, and love’s imaginings,
bundles of peace, Christmas-blessed
with the unborn and the dead at rest,
nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel
or what life itself eventually reveals.
Nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel,
or what life itself eventually reveals.
No more studies of kindness or courtesy,
not grace or charity, all is needless now.
All is needless now, sky, world, family
grieving for their bundles of purity,
now beyond disgrace, failure, winter streets,
of whatever attacks, and then retreats.
Classrooms emptied of children’s things,
paper and paste, and love’s imaginings,
bundles of peace, Christmas-blessed
with the unborn and the dead at rest,
nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel
or what life itself eventually reveals.
©2015 Michael Gessner