Dirge Without Music

How fitting is this angry poem, that rails against the unfairness and cruelty of death, in our current time of school and other mass shootings. The bitterness that boils up inside me, inside so many of us, as we hear of yet another child, police officer, teacher, friend, shot and killed. So many deaths, so many broken hearts left behind. I don’t know why Congress can’t stand up to the NRA. Yes I do. Money. Money and the fear that they will be thrown out of office, like Eric Cantor was (not by the NRA, not because of gun control, but an example of watching out for your constituency). So they talk the good talk for a little while, like right after the massacre at Sandy Hook, and it looks for a minute like something might get done. But it never does. And it never will, until we, the people, demand it. We must convince the electorate that this is what we want, what we need, and the only way to keep their jobs is by getting some serious gun legislation passed.

In the mean time, here is a lovely and heartbreaking poem that comes to my mind when I think of all of these people, young and old, buried before their time.

Dirge without Music

~Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, — but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.