For Inge

Sharing some poetry today.

Yesterday marked eighteen years since one of the students I taught was killed in a terrible, tragic incident that was part violent encounter, part accident. She was only seventeen, in the wrong place at the wrong time, a completely innocent victim of someone else's problem. There was a picture published in the paper the day after her death that showed her slumped in the car where she was shot, glass all around her, a thin line of blood visible beside her mouth - such bad taste and insensitivity on the part of the paper, an image that I wish I had never seen and will never forget. She was pregnant at the time too, with a little boy who was unexpected and inconvenient, I am sure, but would have been so loved and welcomed into her large family. Every now and then I see one of her four sisters around - she doesn't know me but whenever I see her the resemblance takes my breath away and takes me right back to the shock and grief of what happened eighteen years ago.

I wrote this poem shortly after she died. For a long time afterwards her name was in my book of marks/grades with all the numbers in a row beside it (before the days of recording everything digitally!), and seeing it there was always so jarring. She was there, in my class, writing essays and doing grammar tests, and then she was not. It was not okay then and it is still not okay now, eighteen years later, that she is not here on earth with those who loved her. I drew on the experience of her death and especially her funeral when I wrote Teacher, Teacher, and so was reminded of this poem.

For Inge

Fragile was your pretty hair
Your impish, laughing eyes
Fragile as a whispered tune
Fading as it dies

Fragile is the shattered glass
The angle of your head
I fear to see beside your mouth
That fragile line of red

It only took a second
A second - it was done
For a hand to squeeze a trigger
For the shot to leave the gun

So fragile were the doll-like hands
The tiny baby heart
Your life was taken much too soon
His never got to start

How strange to see the row of marks
Just numbers by your name
How strange that life for those you loved
Will never be the same.