Peace Monument by Peter Roan on Flickr

Give sorrow words. – William Shakespeare

Every death’s a knot,
A thorn that snags the soul.
I sing my grief into the ground
And cover up the hole.

No simple anodyne,
These actions that we take
To sanctify the absences
Of those we lose to fate.

Without the weight of form
There is no ritual –
Without such rites we have no way
To make each other whole.

If life is nothing more
Than random accident,
Then art’s the tech we use to make
Each tear a sacrament.

Numbers is a weekly news commentary column in poetical form by Curt Hopkins. “Numbers” is an historic term for poetry, and also alludes to the numbers in programming.

Categories: Activism, Arms, Crime, Journalists, Media, News, Numbers, Poems, Poetry