[Newspoetry] It's All Relative

[DL Emerick]

One Exigesis to "A heroic act in Virginia yesterday"
DL Emerick says:   (at TransylvaniaDutch.com)
On April 17th, 2007 at 3:54 pm

Take away the years between,
from 2007 back to 1945, or so,
find the number 62 to remove it
from his sudden age at death,
finding him back then 14 gaunt,
not much different from his killer,
so far as ages of beings go.

Each may have been confused
about whether any love could live
in a world so callous, indifferent,
but they chose different answers
to paradoxic conundra of living.

One lived on, recalling tragedy
as what happens, willy-nilly,
some challenge we can't avoid,
but the other turned malevolent,
displacing tragedy upon others.

It's a lesson of moral innocence,
that people do violence to you,
to all, when their souls are lost
and lonely, becoming hard, bitter,
letting hatred blind them to all,
letting nothing stand up in them,
by hurting others, transference,
their own deep pain and agony.

No one will shed a tear for failure,
whatever of life brought him down,
for a student who became a killer,
and it will not do, so I suppose,
to weep for him, too, as dead.