Page 270 - What They Did to the Kid

258 Jack Fritscher

him out the next? He was the only person I really knew in all the
outpost of the world. With any other death, the past could have died.
But with him, all the bright future, somehow linked with my passion
of giving, vanished. As long as he was being president, I could see
myself being priest. Alter Christus. Alter Jack. Oh, God. Civilization
slipped from us. Violent. Bloody. Jack’s brains were all over Jackie’s
yellow roses. Big D, little A, double L, A, S. All the boys were in tears.
The priests were in tears. For the first time in history, television sets
were carried into the recreation halls and left on and on and on. I
could talk to no one. Alone in my room, hours later, the night of
the longest day, I pulled my tiny journal from inside my torn shoe
box and wrote before the onrushing terror of darkness, psalmish,
sighing, keening, kaddish, half-dead myself.

22 November 1963
Tonight, oh Lord, the dun land mourns
disbelieving believing,
dessicated leaves of this week
before Thanksgiving (feast from his New England)
rattle and skitter across brown grass.
This Fall’s been a drought on the land,
ended now,
well-watered by weeping.
John Kennedy has passed.
Safe-comfort they had hawked,
sixty-nine cents a pound.
He could have bought it and did not,
chose not to recline in wealth.
Sought rather service.
Sacrificed until sacrificed.
By a young man in the Texas Theater.
Tonight the networks say nothing so well as it is true.
And outside, where there is no moon,
the dessicated leaves rattle across November.
It was gray and wet,
unseasonably warm today.
But in the unloved wind tonight,

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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