The city was struck with violence especially during the first half of this month. Between March 31 and April 15,  several shootings in Richmond left four public school students among the dead. During a River City Poets workshop on contemporary forms, we discussed how using formal poetry can help provide a framework to approach difficult subjects--trauma or events from which we don't yet have the emotional distance to write clearly. Current events had been weighing on my mind, and this form, the bop, which is similar to the sonnet in the way it presents an argument, provided the structure for me to begin to express a little of what I felt as our collective grief. 

The First Two Weeks of April

Blossom-stained streets run hungry
with young blood, the 14-year-old
lying lost at 4^th & Front, the 16-year-old
at the 2100 block of Deforrest,
another found just after midnight
in the dark on St. John.

Let this be the end of the poem.

Later that day, in the bright
of midafternoon, just as schools
opened their doors to spill 
young life out onto 
indifferent sidewalks,
two more are found 
near a home on Jennie Scher Road, 
one pronounced dead at the scene.

Let this, let this be the end of the poem.

Richmond city officials
will be strictly enforcing a new 11-
p.m. curfew. It is still April. 
We breathe in the grief 
with the lilac and the late 
cherry, pleading, pleading

let this be the end of the poem.