Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire

Elegy for an Activist in Winter

E L E G Y F O R A N A C T I V I S T I N W I N T E R Only a portion of your life was captured in your writings; you passed through years of bells & mists. In warm stone cities parallel to violence the ones with guns could never stand for this. In a system unchanged by law, councils, charts of the magistrates, friends jailed without notice would never know what filled the spectrum. Sentences living in intimate spaces & a ritual kindness of strangers saved you; through the years while cities burned without notice, the writings of others were canceled by violence. Iron bells & rifles filled the warm spaces. Magistrates captured by ritual passed you. Intimate friends vanished in the councils. In a system unchanged by law, only you recalled that portion of the spectrum. The jailed work of sentences saved you. In cities of strangers you infinitely lived, as now, as always, words are living— 3 8 ...