Saturday, August 20, 2011

MY SENIOR YEAR

The vicious, blameless, universe
killed two high school girls
in my class in 1971.
Betty Wong was smart and sweet,
taken by leukemia.
Susan Thompson, promising poet,
by suicide.
Tonight, forty years later, I think of them.
They would never go on
to the new possibilities women would have.
No college, career, marriage, family.
All that was left
were some good people
crying in the night.

copyright 2011 David Elsey