Poem: In memoriam (Virginia Tech, 2007)

The dawn seems to shut its eyes
Unwilling to see the light
That flitters forth from the morn,
And hangs, unassumingly slight
Like a dewdrop unfettered from its leafy moor
Til it touches the cold weight of the stones…
The sad remembrances of an innocence gone.

What possesses a soul to call to its blood?
And deal in imagined iniquities and slights?
What tortures, imagined or real,
Could mangle the wrong out of the right?
And whereabouts is God, when the rooms fill
With unanswered prayers whispered with tears?
Whereabouts is the heart, longing still,
Yet now and forevermore, silent
As the wind whispers through these now blackest of hills?

Where once these halls held all
But the most wayward of youthful dreams,
One… one dream it could not call,
The one most silent of all,
A sigh of longing unfulfilled;
A cry to the winds of what might have been.

And yet years after the day when the world turned upside down
And the souls of heroes mighty rose in chorus to the night…
If you listen, listen well, you will hear
The songs of the angels as delicate as footsteps on clouds,
Welcoming all, all whose dreams will never disappear
But instead stand eternally proud
In the halls that will never lose their light.