Major American Poets - Stephen Dunn

                                                      A Missing Person

                                                                                               By Lisa Boston Frye

 

             

              Where are they now?  Heaven?

              What happens to folks,

              the ones that disappear

              like smoke in a breeze,

              blown elsewhere

              as brittle November leaves

              scuttling across a deserted street?  

             

              Time’s lost souls

              once solid and so important to life’s scheme,

              they drift off, unloosed by our gravity 

              to spiral away into nothingness...

              They shift into uneasy memory

              and return to visit us

              when we least expect them.

             

              Could we have intervened

              made a difference

              changed the outcome

              or has it been written somewhere by a larger hand

              what will happen to them

              and us

          when we tread a chosen path.  

               

              Whatever happened to shy Marjie,

              whose glorious smile

              and luminous brown eyes charmed us.

              You strummed the guitar intently,

              sang plaintively,

              survived cancer. 

             

              You jumped off the bridge! 

             

              I can see you dangling from the unsteady grip of a would be rescuer

              as you hang over the side  

              a hundred feet above jagged rocks and current. 

              You’re pleading now, too late,

              “Don’t let me fall, don’t let me fall.” 

              And then, of course,  you fell. 

             

              I saw your son on the street today

              and the other children were taunting him. 

              I wondered who he could have been

              if his mother were here

              to build him up

              to let him know he is someone. 

              Now what will become of him. 

             

              Why did you choose life too late

              take the shallow road too soon

              when you knew what you had

              as you scaled that wall

              defiantly... 

              and became a dark memory...

              a … missed …  missing person.