For those who try to heal the scourge of gun violence…

 

L’Anima Semplicetta

 

Dear Mr. St. John: Thank you

for thinking of me.  I am fine,

though I have no words

to say how it is here.  You ask

what you should do.  Set down

your poem about the man who’s blinded

by the smoke, while climbing up

the Mount of Purgatory and about

the “simple soul.”  Take back

the bullet from my brain.

Pick up my school-books and my hat

from the pavement.  Follow

the stray shot back.  When you get

to Marshall, take the gun from his hand.

And re-collect the smoke.  Tell him

I’ll come sometime, to loose

the knot of anger from his neck. But you

must keep on walking, to my school.  Climb up

its seven stone steps.  And on the fourth step, sit

and weigh the flattened bullet in your hand.

It is such a light, slight thing;

and it is not.  It is all the weight

of our whole world.  It is what

we make.  Now do something that will not

make sense: touch it to your lips —

this cold, dark coal — then set it just

beneath your tongue.  Of course

it leaves a bitter taste.  Let i

dissolve.  Let it become your bones.

Let it cloud your brain.  Let it impair

your speech.  And let your tongue,

at all the worst of times, suddenly

speak the obvious.  Let it never

stop speaking the obvious.  Yours, Ebony.

 

Richard St. John

from The Pure Inconstancy of Grace

(Truman State University Press, 2005)

 

 

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