A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

Crosswalked in winter where your dream was riven
Into red fragments on a city street,
We pause today as curbed and unforgiven,
As jayed and ticketed and incomplete.
Clio had wooed and won you long before us,
Whose dress is draggled in such ancient blood
That, had you lived, were you quite sure this chorus
Had not stepped catastrophic still, or could
This fickle tragic land of yours have borne you
By four white horses to some private wood?
Oh, all the printing presses mourn you.

Today let every lackeyed brain be rifled;
Let memoirs thunder like a little gun
For trusted men and those with whom you trifled;
Let flowers praise you to the Texas sun;
Today your name is common as a ditty,
Your profiles dollared out in every mart;
November enfilades the edge of cities.
It is not you who move the poem to pity;
It is the Dallas of the human heart.

Editor’s note: I find this to be one of the most affecting poems in the Ancient Letters. It took me some time to understand why this poem of a modern event stood next to homage to Catullus and Homer. But if one takes the view that it is only events that pass and that human nature does not, then an event twenty years past is as gone as one two-thousand years ago seems as ancient, sometimes even to those who lived through it.