The Scarecrow (for Matthew Shepard) by Lorette C. Luzajic

Benny's Scarecrow, by Andrew Wyeth, 1955.

The Scarecrow (for Matthew Shepard)

With you pinned up in the sky
like a scarecrow in a field of apples,
knowing for hours you were going to die,
it was almost Christian
how you gave up the ghost.
You were a bruised light
tethered and
softer than a pale blue dust shard.
You were psychedelic in the papers,
as they whirled you into hero, target
victim, saviour, shame.
Yet you were only the Hanged Man,
baffled by the things that this world lacks,
how few devices in it left to save you.

Lorette C. Luzajic

This poem is from The Astronaut's Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, Handymaiden Editions, 2006.
It is reprinted here today in memory of our fallen friends in Orlando, Florida.