by Thomas R. Smith
So a lost brother has taken a bullet.
We grasp after a coherent motive.
Another of the terminally online?
Noticing the victim did nothing to help
protect others from this kind of death.
Said a few deaths are worth his “freedom.”
Would he have considered his own death
by the gun worth it? Are we allowed to ask
whether this is irony or karma?
The mind unmoored from spirit, scrambled
by strange signals, tears loose from the real.
Can we be honest about our part in this?
Life is change, but fear turns change to death,
fear rooted in hatred, self-hatred
of the changing different one within.
I mourn his first death, the earlier one
when he turned away from decency and kindness
to join the church of the desecrated heart.
Thomas R. Smith’s recent books are a poetry collection Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications) and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press). He lives in western Wisconsin near the Kinnickinnic River.
