poetry Poem on the Murders

After the murders, poet Anita Barrows addresses this elegy to a survivor, Diamond Lavish Reynolds, asking "how can we make your tears not/another deleted narrative?"

Anita Barrows Tikkundaily
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Poem on the Murders

By Anita Barrows

Phliando Castile was an African-American the cafeteria manager at a Montessori Middle School in suburban Minnesota.  He was shot dead by police on July 6 after being stopped for a broken tail light. His girlfriend, Diamond Lavish Reynolds, immediately began narrating his murder on her phone (sent out via Facebook) as she sat beside him while he was dying in the car. Her 4-year old daughter, also in the car, witnessed everything.

This is for you, Diamond Lavish Reynolds,

before your name disappears among so many

others, before your voice

is forgotten, before you wake up

one morning, still just 24, your child

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beside you, and find only the goneness,

on the other side of the bed. This is for you

on the morning you wake and wonder

what you are going to do now

with your life, how you are going to talk

to the four-year-old child who saw the cop

fire the gun at Philando, the child you called

your “angel,” your first consolation.

This is for you when the news has stopped talking

about what happened, when the news has passed on

to other deaths.  This is for you

in this country of guns, or cruelty, of dismissal;

for you, Diamond

Lavish Reynolds, on some humid morning

in August, as you push the blankets

away, your child

curled in sleep, so small,

and walk into the bathroom and look for the first

time in weeks carefully

at your face in the mirror, ask yourself how

you are going to live

now with only this absence,

one of your eyes consumed with grief, the other

with outrage.  How can we hold this

with you, how can we make your tears not

another deleted narrative?

Anita Barrows is a poet who has won multiple awards including The Quarterly Review of Poetry Contemporary Poetry Award, The Riverstone Press Award, andThe Robinson Jeffers Foundation Award.  Her translations (with Joanna Macy) of three volumes of Rilke's poetry have been set to music, choreographed, and read at various public events.  Barrows lives in Berkeley, California, where she is a tenured Professor at The Wright Institute and maintains a private practice in clinical psychology.