Elegy Updated

Stand with 10,000 ghosts
Hear their last words
Hurrying to the river
Running into the trees
Shedding this life for new

Drop your envy and yearning on the ground
Nestle your love in the rocks’ mortar
Be part of the wall that stays behind
Shelter the lost and the growing
Reach your arms to the sun and the blue

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Photo taken at Tuzigoot National Monument in Arizona

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I wrote this poem in 2016 the morning after I learned that the son of an old friend had died by suicide. He was Native American, as was she and her other children, and, by happenstance, I ended up at a national park in Arizona centered on an ancient Indian community excavated in the 1930’s. We visited again yesterday, March 2024. We walked all the paths but couldn’t find the arch in this photo. I worried that it had crumbled but, in the end, decided that I hadn’t looked hard enough. The wind was blowing hard, and it was cold. I was in a hurry to get to the warm side of the village.

In the poem, I aimed at timelessness, wanting to say that my friend’s beautiful son would be living in a place that was green and welcoming. It was a meager gift but all I had. My imagination and well wishes and naivete. Words. Scraps of paper. A photo of a place that was gone.