Grief,
where every whispered demise of the known
thunders through the collective psyche,
I choke on the bile of disparity.
Celebrate them, the icons, with your weeping vigils,
clad in the garish black of public sorrow,
broadcasted eulogies reverberating
in the hollows of my scorn.
Their names, etched into the sky—
why?
For merely dancing in the light, louder?
Here, in the quiet earth,
my loved ones lay without the chorus of the world;
their endings marked by the absence of flowers,
no songs composed in their memory.
Obscure in life, invisible in death,
their void, unwept by any but me.
Screw the grandeur of famed departures,
the opulence of global mourning,
where tears are currency
in the economy of attention.
My contempt, a cloak wrapped tight
around the cold indifference
to the unnamed multitudes.
Who grants them—these icons—their immortality?
Why should their extinguishing
be a fire that consumes all air,
leaving us breathless,
when every day,
the unnoticed go quietly,
gentle into that good night?
I find a truth:
Death is the great equalizer,
and yet, in death, as in life,
inequality prevails.
