All We Can Do

When I heard the story of how she died,
    I did not want to know her name—
To me, it was enough that she was a child.
She was riding with her family in the back
    of the wagon, and somehow she fell,
         or was thrown, into the road
And it broke her back, or her neck, maybe,
    and she lay there, struggling to get up.
When her family saw it, they ran to her,
   and her face was already gray with death
      and she was trying her best not to cry
And she said, “Mama, I’m trying not to cry.”
One of her siblings, seeing her color,
      asked if she was dead,
And she said, “Am I going to die? But
          I don’t want to die.”
And her mother said, “Darling, it’s okay,
     I’m holding you, it’s okay to die.”

When I heard the story, I wanted to jump off a cliff,
    I wanted to put a bullet in my head,
I said, I cannot live, I do not want to live
   in a universe where a child writhes dying on the road,
      trying her best to be brave, to not cry.
I don’t want to live in a world where anyone,
     at any moment, can drop through to such horror.
I went to a ridge on the side of a mountain
   and I sat there, my back against the rocks,
        looking down at the world:
Still raging, still roiling, still stunned by the pain
     (for once, years ago, it had been me,
        the one holding the child).
And I watched the haze of the evening
   settle over the farms and the little squares of pasture
        with the animals moving, dark blots, in them,
And far away, the traffic streaming away along the freeway,
   and the mountains to the south, and close to me,
       over it all, a buzzard wheeling.
I watched this world into which I had been born,
   where the one true given is that we each die,
And I said to myself, “Is that all we can do?”
    as the sun slid down in the west.
Some teenagers came, laughing quietly to each other,
   stepping around me politely, “Excuse me,” to
      settle a distance away, voices rising and falling,
     low coughs, the smell of smoke,
                 companionable silence.
The shadows grew along the side of the mountain, over the
       highways and the farms.
“That’s all we can do,” I thought, “but we can do that, there is that,
       at least we have that—
             we can hold each other as we die.”