FOR DOLORES O'RIORDAN: 1971-2018

by Dana Yost

The way I’d shudder at it,
the way anger and grief
mingled and wrapped around
until they’d become a growl

of exasperation, anger manifest
in the ferocity, the flagellation of your primal strum,
the way a person would pound
a hard-clenched fist on a table

and say sorry, all, I've had enough.
As if you were tired of it, the bombs
and guns, little boys dead. How it goes ’round,
and you tire of it. How I tire of it.

The sorrow interlaced with your anger might
explain my weeps. Or is it the tender brogue,
lingered notes that cry your wounds,
what a critic called your “fierce vulnerability?”

I saw it, I heard it, even before I knew
of the deeper dark within you: my deeper
dark, too. It’s the dark we claw to escape, its hounding,
but never shall we, because to do so we’d have

to escape ourselves.
The earth took your body this week.
As long as I live, it will not take your voice.

The bombs, the guns will not take this world.

Dana Yost is a poet, author and former award-winning daily newspaper editor and writer. His most recent book is a history book 1940: Journal of a Midwestern Town, Story of an Era.