Author Information
Brief Elegy For Clint Alberta
Sometimes a conspiracy of silence
can wreak more havoc and injury than violence.
Chosen inaction' can easily mount a full
attack upon someone made vulnerable---
say, by abandonment to poverty;
unquestioned by the bystanders' quiet perfidy---
deliberate disregard, subtle and implied,
effects a cornering swerve to suicide
of one in whom is found intolerable difference,
whose does not share the crowd's experience,
or with whom a multitude demand to disagree.
The sanitized term is intolerance:
it cannot be explained away as ignorance;
it is the most ancient sin of arrogance.
Starward
