Word: griefs
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...outrage and grief naturally dispose us to seek something to blame and, if possible, to eradicate it with all the force and vengeance we can muster. But we ought to pause before we let the axe of our sorrow strike a blow at the trunk of our constitution...
...meantime, the Columbine survivors are left with their fear and grief. The grocery stores are out of cellophane cones of flowers. Prom pictures have become obituary shots. A bunch of kids went out to dinner at Applebee's Thursday night. Everyone stared. "They knew we were kids from Columbine," says junior Scott Schulte. "No one said anything. Then a waitress dropped a booster chair. We all jumped...
...scenes of carnage and grief, side by side on television. Flip: a teenage girl lies on a gurney, her throat freckled with bloodstains. Flip: a mother in Kosovo keens over the body of her child. Flip: children running from the Columbine school. Flip: refugees dragging themselves up a mountain road. Flip: Serbian mass murderers. Flip: "Trench Coat Mafia" mass murderers. Two lines of categorical hatred meet at a point before our eyes, but it is imponderable still, out of the question, unreal--all that death...
...points or five points or seven--the more points the better. And, yes, he did urge school boards to apply for federal grants that would put armed police officers in schools. But in the face of the carnage, he mostly dropped the wonkery and assumed the role of National Grief Counselor. "It is very important to explain to children, all over America, what has happened," he said, "and to reassure our own children that they are safe." If anyone thought it odd that the government's chief executive officer was advising parents on what to whisper to their children...
...what that job is, but I know, at least for me, that I need it done. Poetry offers a verbal form, an object made out of words, as compensation for urgent, but amorphous dilemmas: the "mess" of remembering joy amidst sorrow or of loving the wrong person or of grief. Of course it knows that its kind of compensation is immensely limited and circumscribed, that no mere poem will bring back childhood or a dead friend; such knowledge forces it back, time and again, on the only trick it knows: namely, constructing a gorgeous verbal contraption. The mystery...