A Poem on Death, Grief, and Social Injustice

From Robert Hayden’s “Words in Mourning Time”

For King, for Robert Kennedy,
destroyed by those they could not save,
for King for Kennedy I mourn.
And for America, self destructive, self-betrayed.

I grieve. Yet know the vanity
of grief – through power of
The Blessed Exile’s
transilluminating word

aware of how these deaths, how all
the agonies of our deathbed childbed age
are process, major means whereby,
oh dreadfully, our humanness must be achieved.