this little town,
has been shifted.
like an earthquake
It arrived unexpected,
and delivered It’s force--
aiming directly at our simplicity.
____

How do you live when a part of you is now gone?

All mothers are now in torrential pain
and weep, as I do now,
at the thought of the
moment when she must look down
at the shattered body,
of the one she gave life to,
to say “yes this was my daughter.”
How do you live when a part of you is now gone?

And the fathers, now full of rage
who most understandably, want to decimate
the blackness that destroyed The One Precious thing
that they were meant to protect.
I honor their rage and contempt,
but I also pray for it to move out of their way and let them love again
How do you live when a part of you is now gone?

And the friends, oh the friends--
who are all too damn young to have this
lie at their feet. I know their sorrow and fear will
sleep next to them for many nights to come and
most likely will slip into their dreams
keeping them possessed by it’s fear.
I hope they can stay awake long enough to believe that they are safe.
How do you live when a part of you is now gone?

And the rest of us who had these children walk amongst us:
teachers, spiritual leaders, mom-friends, and Friend-of-Friends--
our helplessness, our unending sorrow of wanting 

to erase something we have no control of.
Our anger at losing someone we also nurtured and tried to protect.
We have been displaced and been raped of our small-town belief 

that nothing like this can ever happen to one of our own.
How do you live when a part of you is now gone?

Suffering has come to us as an enormous slap in the face
An “I told you so” way of acknowledging Her presence in our everyday lives.
Presence in the belief that just like we cannot control
a seismic wave of the earth,
we can still measure it's fault lines:
because the tenets that hold us together
have a no-fault way of keeping us whole
and each day continue to ask
How do WE live when a part of US is now gone?