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Questions for Shakespeare: Kerrville, 7-4-25 [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-09
Those of us in Central Texas are still in pain from the horrible floods that killed so many on July 4th, and especially the 20-some children from Camp Mystic. The poem below seeks, as humbly as possible, to commemorate this tragedy.
As I was thinking about the flooding, the image of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet kept coming to mind—together with an outraged sense that this image was wrong, even offensive, as a way of characterizing the Texas drownings. This poem is an effort to adjust that image and to put the blame for the event where it lies, even if the flood’s proximal causes were multiple.
My apologies to the Bard for making him a heavy here. His view of “Nature” was more wary and complex than I imply. But he’s bigger than I am and can take it.
My apologies, too, for producing a diary (my first: yikes) that adds no information to what we know about its subject. The diary contains no helpful links, tables, etc. All I can say is that I’m grateful to the Kos community for providing a welcoming forum for opinion and pure self-expression. In stressful times, the need for both is very real.
*****
What do you know of painting drowned girls, Will?
Your best one’s just a fiction, driven mad,
Yet eloquent, and old enough for boys.
She sinks for love, tra-la-ing as she goes,
A single victim of the state’s domestic mess—
Of one man’s vengeance and his search for self—
Half glad to fade, dissolving prettily.
Imagine young girls drowning by the brace, Will,
In cold, hard fact, if years and miles away.
Why stop at one? See twenty—children under ten or so,
At camp to be more selfless and serve God
(How much of self could they have brought along?),
To hike, sing songs, and paddle in a creek
That later, while they slept, became a beast twelve times its daylight size
And made their simple faith a joke.
Show them clutching pillows and plush toys
(Where they could find them in the soggy dark),
Screaming for whoever they could name,
Then roughly choked to silence by the waves:
Virgin sacrifices to a raging greed—state policy—
That had been called (by all the greedy) “thrift.”
Those who could have warned them had been sacked,
Their jobs left empty, sirens left unbuilt,
So billionaires could have more cash
To undo laws that kept their greed in check,
And drown more children, elsewhere if not here.
Your Avon never knew a Texas flood, Will.
Thus far your lack of vision is excused.
But we have richer trash to dump into the drink,
And, in the water, this you must see too:
Not just the many bodies swept away
(Each purer, smaller than your crooning girl’s),
But the mighty products of complacent trade,
Which quickly, falsely, raise without remorse
The leaden hopes of those who seek the dead
Downstream, amid the tangles of mesquite and vines,
The beer can here, the car tire there,
The plastic bags and boots and re-bar,
Indigestible by Nature, as bodies of mere children aren’t—
The only line between them in the flood.
The parents must find comfort where they can,
In Chance, God’s will, or Nature’s great unknowns.
The rest of us are angry, safety bent, and know:
Our children, subject to decay, are only lesser junk
To those unable to constrain their will
(Which they exalt as “freedom” when they’re pressed).
Rosebuds painted on the angels gone
Can never hide the human ugliness
That took them off, or the need for human law.
Nature out of bounds is not our friend—
Whatever Will and maggots have to say.
[END]
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