A note from the poet: The massacre in Aurora is another deep wound to the state and to the nation, and for obvious reasons I hesitated trying to make a poem on such a subject. In the end, I thought about the faces, the masked face of the shooter, the emerging faces of the dead, the unfathomable story they tell. Here is a short poem about that shock.
After the Last Shot
So much goes by unseen: the parking lots,
the passing cars, the brick apartment blocks
and faces masked in shade or turned away.
How many faces did you see today?
After the last shot one face will appear
and then another-Here I am. I’m here-
but others are not there. Not anywhere.
Still you see them. See, they begin to blur,
a recurring nightmare jolting you awake.
You try to drown it in the TV talk
or take a walk where sad arroyos run
in waterless confusion through the land.
David Mason is the Poet Laureate of Colorado.
