Mourning # 20

Mourning # 20

 

And now – double lockdown

we couldn’t go out except for necessities

now necessities aren’t necessary

what is? taxes and death?

is there any more severe measure

our leaders could adopt? – yes.

there is permanent lockdown

there is never go out ever again

death-row solitary-confinement life, life-

not-life – there is no sun underground

triple lock down for all, some now

some next month, we’re all bound;

headed there soon, to the land of doom

that’s banal, but true, the banal truth.

 

---- Alexa Rose Veit, a teenager, 15,

and a cancer survivor from Kentucky and

a special needs individual contracted

leukemia in 2019. In 2020 she and her mother

began experiencing symptoms of the 

coronavirus and both tested positive and were

hospitalized. Alexa’s older sister also tested

positive as did their grandparents who were

hospitalized, also in Nashville. Her mother

survived; Alexa did not.

 

Her high school, Ballard Memorial, wrote

“Our world is a little less bright without Alexa

in it…. We will miss her special kind of mischief,

her infectious smile, and the laugh that never

failed to light up a room.”