Like everyone, over the last few days I have been trying to make sense of the horror visited on the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Of course there is no sense to be made of it, nor is there any real comfort to be found for those whose lives it changed forever.
But as I read of the young victims (and those who valiantly tried to protect them) being laid to rest this week, I was reminded of this brief but beautiful poem on the deaths of innocents, by a great American poet:
On the Death of Friends in Childhood
Donald Justice
We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.
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