We relive the assassination of John F. Kennedy every time we witness the grainy film from November 22nd, 1963. This haunting poem, by Timothy Richardson, captures the awful events of that unforgettable day and the later murder of his his accused assassin while asking why such things happen. With interpretation by Jeff Flint.

ON NOVEMBER 22nd

Kennedy

He tuned the Dream til consciences arose.
Like frames evoking paper dolls they lack,
a granite screen restains the bloody scene.

… he waves to a sea of adoring signs with sculptured
calm… the convertible turns… time aligns…
!—breaking the orbit of his skull, it scratches
the eyes in the nation’s face with disbelief.
He is still being shot, clasps the spill,
quavers as if the film were stuttering
on the second round and slumps down in her lap,
his head too hurt to care it’s emptying…

Why leers through bars of my imagination:
the shadow of subtraction has no end,
it lies inside, gropes for light and weeps.
Otherwise, it would be possible to forget him.

Oswald

Thousands of stiffened words float on his soul,
glint through the wilderness his puffed eye assumes.
What mouthless ‘truth’ made him the instrument
if he did gun down this day to make it live?

Through painful childhood sights, perhaps the slugs
seemed butterflies breaking their cocoon (his spite),
or he met a radical muse with blanket thoughts
and felt the toxic rush of vanity
til he lost control of sanity’s violent core
or he saw his hands, lopping off our head,
as an unwinding clock’s predestined stroke
or his desert image bungled martyrdom.

He slowly curls into that ‘O!’, once more—
collapses; another hole in a dead future
as the lengths of an assassin reach him, too.