26
Your names toll in my dreams.
I pick up tinsel in the street. A nameless god
streaks my hand with blood. I look at the lighted trees
in windows & the spindles of pine tremble
in warm rooms. The flesh of home, silent.
How quiet the bells of heaven must be, cold
with stars who cannot rhyme their brilliance
to our weapons. What rouses our lives each moment?
Nothing but life dares dying. My memory, another obituary.
My memory is a cross. Face down. A whistle in high grass.
A shadow pouring down the sill of calamity.
Your names wake me in the nearly dark hour.
The candles in our windows flicker
where your faces peer in, ask us
questions light cannot answer.
Copyright © 2013 by Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on February 21, 2013.
"The imagery and language of the gun in the American memory must be buried. There is so much more to hold up, more to praise. This elegy is for all of us, because we all need to remember how to live in ways that reassert our humanity. This is one of the most literal poems I've ever written and it is like, as so much is in the times we live, an unanswerable flare, a cry for change."
—Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, visual artist, and novelist. Her hybrid collection of poetry and photography, Seeing the Body (W. W. Norton), was published in 2020. Other poetry collections include Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books, 2015); The Requited Distance (Sheep Meadow Press, 2011); Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2011); and Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books, 2010). She is also the author of the novel Promise (Random House, 2023).