poetry JFK

As the anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination returns in a month of political trauma, Peter Neil Carroll's "JFK" reflects on the loss of possibility and the hope for renewal.

Peter Neil Carroll Poet Lore
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JFK

By Peter Neil Carroll

Not my first death, not the most intimate.
Not like the cousin who died last week or news
today that a friend I haven’t seen since Kennedy
was president passed ten years ago.

At Columbia Point, thunderheads reflect
on gray waters, spring gulls break
into manic shrieks, a solitary pigeon moans
past my bench.

Around the bend, the presidential museum
draws in chattering schoolchildren and teachers
brought to respectful silence by the taped voice:

Old as the Scriptures,
clear as the Constitution

We all breathe the same air.
We all cherish our children's future.
And we are all mortal.

So many others, so much closer—
my lusty father, my antique mother.
Boys and girls running in circles in memory
and nowhere else.

The wind rises. Seabirds screech in swerving
coils, drift into soft splashes. Ducks paddle by
as they do in picture books.

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The dream lives on, his brother’s words...

the rumble of a jet beyond the clouds.

Peter Neil Carroll’s fourth collection of poems, The Truth Lies on Earth: A Year by Dark, by Bright (Turning Point Press), will be published in 2017. Other titles are Fracking Dakota: Poems for a Wounded Land (2015) and A Child Turns Back to Wave: Poetry of Lost Places (2012). He lives in northern California.