Laura Erickson's For the Birds

On this sad day, we commemorate seven of humanity’s best and brightest. We humans were first inspired to take wing as we watched birds in flight, and early dreams of space travel were probably hatched as people sat out under the night sky, listening to nighthawks and owls and looking up at the moon and the stars, dreaming of escaping our earthly sorrows. Now as we mourn the deaths of these brave human beings and anticipate more untimely human deaths in the coming months, I can’t help but think of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1928 poem “Dirge Without Music” from her book, The Buck in the Snow:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,–but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love, –
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave,
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Edna St. Vincent Millay