Mourning # 20
And now – double lockdown
we couldn’t go out except for necessities
now necessities aren’t necessary
what is? taxes and death?
is there any more severe measure
our leaders could adopt? – yes.
there is permanent lockdown
there is never go out ever again
death-row solitary-confinement life, life-
not-life – there is no sun underground
triple lock down for all, some now
some next month, we’re all bound;
headed there soon, to the land of doom
that’s banal, but true, the banal truth.
---- Alexa Rose Veit, a teenager, 15,
and a cancer survivor from Kentucky and
a special needs individual contracted
leukemia in 2019. In 2020 she and her mother
began experiencing symptoms of the
coronavirus and both tested positive and were
hospitalized. Alexa’s older sister also tested
positive as did their grandparents who were
hospitalized, also in Nashville. Her mother
survived; Alexa did not.
Her high school, Ballard Memorial, wrote
“Our world is a little less bright without Alexa
in it…. We will miss her special kind of mischief,
her infectious smile, and the laugh that never
failed to light up a room.”