I heard a few hours ago that the second brother had in fact not yet been captured. This was told me by the lawyer hired by Nina’s family and told to her by the Attorney General of the state of Jalisco. The announcement of the capture seemed so official, but looks like this case is going to twist and turn.
I am so relieved to report that one of the men responsible for my friends’ death has been apprehended and is in jail. They are presently in pursuit of his brother, who reportedly assisted in the robbery and murder. The American Consul has assured us that our region of Lake Chapala is not on the “Do Not Travel” list and that they consider this to be an isolated incident and not of danger to travelers and residents. The chief of police assured us that this was a robbery, not a revenge killing, and that Nina and Edward’s deaths were swift and that they did not suffer unduly. The robbers were unaware of their presence in the house and when they discovered their presence, they killed them out of fear of being recognized and caught. We are all so sad about the death of our friends but also anxious that people not panic over this horrible act which echoes so many other violent actions in the world. The poem that I published in my last blog seems to be all the more true at this point. Nina was a happy person who loved Mexico. She would be the last to want people to live in fear. I saw Edward a few days before his death and we had a discussion about his family’s fears about his return to Mexico, given his health issues. One of the last comments that passed between us was our agreement that it does no good to live in fear–that we must live the lives we want to live for as long as we can. Edward lived up to this declaration.
Upon the Violent Death of a Friend
Bar every window.
Avoid the Dark.
The dart is coming.
You’re on the mark.
Chain up your gateways.
Bar the door.
Whatever evil finds you,
There is always more.
In your life’s highway,
avoid the skids.
Don’t talk to strangers.
Lock up your kids.
Darkness advances
by ticks and tocks.
Take no chances.
Recheck the locks.
Don’t take airplanes
or cars or ships.
Keep what’s private
behind your lips.
Buy a gun and
keep it cocked.
If you knew who’s watching,
you would be shocked.
Lock your bedroom
when you retire.
Life’s a minefield.
Don’t trip the wire.
Wrap your kids in
cotton wool.
Don’t dare send them
out to school.
Mind the playgrounds.
Avoid the street.
Television
is more discrete.
Train your dogs to
attack and kill
whomever enters
against your will.
Limit friends to
a very few.
New ones just might
target you.
Build your walls up
both high and wide.
Then just fester
alone, inside.
The prompt on this last day of National Poetry Month is to find a shortish poem that you like, and rewrite each line, replacing each word (or as many words as you can) with words that mean the opposite. I chose Sonnet 18 by Shakespeare.
Time Temporal
by Judy Dykstra-Brown
Shall I contrast thee to a winter’s night?
Thou art less lovely and more tempestuous.
No wind disturbs November’s empty stalks,
Oe’r which the winter hath too long a power.
Sometimes the too-cold moon lies sheathed in clouds.
And rarely does its pitted face shine forth.
Yet light from dark may rise. We’re proof of that,
Spurred on by fate or providence’s plan.
But thy short winter soon shall pass away,
Restore to thee the homeliness of death.
Nor shall that birth that brought you forth to light
Still claim thee when time curtains you with night.
As men lose breath and eyes give up their sight,
So dies this poem, and you echo its plight.
Sonnet 18
by William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Day 28 The prompt today was to write a poem about a color.
Yellow
You were so red, so white.
So much of you was blue.
Yellow is what I missed in you—
that brilliant optimism—
that power of the sun.
There was that black in you
that cancelled it out.
You were the artist who understood color the most.
That color created by the union of yellow and black, you knew.
Your white hair, confined in a pony tail
or streaming down your back
in your wild man look
prompted strangers to ask
if you were a shaman,
or declare you to be one.
That red that flamed out from your work,
subtly put there even in places where it had no
logical purpose for being.
That red tried to make things right.
All of us who knew you
knew the blue.
It was the background color of all of your days.
It was the blanket in which we wrapped ourselves at night,
trying to be close,
but always always divided
by blue.
For fifteen years,
I believed that one day I’d bring you to yellow.
There were splashes of it, surely,
throughout our lives together.
You on the stage, reading your heart,
me in the audience, recognizing
all the colors from within you—even yellow.
Finding the pictures you had taken of me
at the art show, looking at your work—
those pictures taken even before we ever met.
I discovered, after you’d passed,
that you had recognized
me even then, when I thought
I was the only one
angling for a meeting—
sure of my need to know those secret parts of you
that I will never know
now that you have given yourself
to the black
or blue
or red
or even to the white.
Whatever your ever after
has delivered you to.
A new life later,
I am suffused
by my own canvas
of memories of you—
every other pigment
splashed against
a vivid background
of yellow.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 