Elegy for the Children

This week one of my former students lost her five-month-old son to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. I tell you this so that you can add a specific, individual grief to your horror at yet another school massacre, yet another opportunity for our legislators to do nothing.

A thin rain is falling here in Portland. Pale fog crouches over the roofs and trees and fences. I yank my recycling bin out to the street and say good morning to my neighbor, who says good morning to me. He is lithe and brisk and forty-ish and starting to lose his hair. I've seen him shoveling out his driveway and parking his sensible car. I've seen him toss a football back and forth with his six-year-old son. My assumption is that he's a nice man who does not stockpile firearms in his basement and dream of bloodbaths. But who knows?

My former student woke up on Wednesday morning and found a dead baby.

Her stepfather used to be my plow guy in Harmony. He features in my poem "Valentine's Day." His children borrowed books from my children, and played on their sports teams, and quarreled together on the playground. When I was their music teacher, I taught them to sing Woody Guthrie songs and Johnny Cash songs and how to play three simple chords on the guitar. That was my job.

If a gunman had opened fire during music class, I would have had to die for his children. That would have been my job too.

Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when he lay,
When thy Son lay, pierc'd by the shaft which flies
In darkness?

Shelley wrote those lines in "Adonais," a poem dedicated to Keats, yet the metaphors remind me that he, like us, knew something about the death of children. One after another after another, his babies died. Shelley was an unreliable and feckless husband, but he did love those children. His love did not keep them alive.

When I was in Rome, I visited the grave of one of those lost infants. In order to stand in that place, I had to leave my own two small boys behind, far away, in America. I had to trust that they would be safe until I returned. I could easily have been mistaken.

Our legislators have made their opinions clear: It is acceptable to murder teachers as they try to protect their students. It is acceptable to murder children as they try to telephone their mothers to say, "I love you."

If a gunman had opened fire during music class, I would have had to die for my students. And then the gunman would have kept shooting, and my students would have died too.

Shelley famously declared, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." If so, we are just as useless as the acknowledged ones, at least when it comes to keeping our children alive.

Grief is both specific and formless. It tears at us, day upon day, as the eagle tore at Prometheus' liver. Imagine those mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and friends and teachers and grandparents and neighbors jolting awake, night after night--their memories poisoned, their dreams unhinged.

As Shelley knew, "The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break."