RCG-I Seasonal Salon Fall Equinox 2005

Elegy for Distant Strangers

As strangers suffer, we are distant witnesses
to intimate details of their bodies and their lives
that we should never know. But knowing blesses

us. It makes us sudden lovers. Love caresses
bodies in this way: constant touching with the eyes.
As strangers suffer, we are desperate witnesses

from distant safety. We hear the latest guesses
of fatalities and loss. Each death deprives:
someone we shall never know and knowing, bless.

Yet in their public deaths, each one confesses
more than we might learn in several lives.
As strangers suffer, we are distant witnesses

to their lost hopes and fears and trespasses.
When dreams are drowned, what else survives?
We do not, cannot know. Would knowing bless us

any more than mournful ignorance that compresses
into empathy? The sense of fellowship revives
as distant strangers suffer. We are witnesses.
And those we never knew, unknowing, bless us.