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# Mourners
- URL: https://www.andyposner.org/mourners/
- Published: 2022-05-29T17:56:59.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-21T04:44:05.000Z
- Description: We are all mourners now, our clothes funeral shrouds we tear off our backs when the time comes (and it will come); in one pocket we carry brushes for tidying the graves we stumble on in schools, churches, nightclubs, concerts, grocery stores, streetcorners...
- Author: Andy
- Tags: America on the Brink, Be The Change, poetry, Politics, #Migrated-1784090317409, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-07-15 04:39

“*Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne...”* – [James Russel Lowell](https://poets.org/poem/present-crisis?ref=andyposner.org)

We are all mourners now, our clothes funeral shrouds we tear off our backs when the time comes (and it will come); in one pocket we carry brushes for tidying the graves we stumble on in [schools](https://www.texastribune.org/2022/05/27/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-timeline/?ref=andyposner.org), [churches](https://www.npr.org/2020/06/17/878828088/5-years-after-charleston-church-massacre-what-have-we-learned?ref=andyposner.org), [nightclubs](https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/2016-orlando-shooting?ref=andyposner.org), [concerts](https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/las-vegas-shooting/las-vegas-police-investigating-shooting-mandalay-bay-n806461?ref=andyposner.org), [grocery stores](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/05/14/nyregion/buffalo-shooting?ref=andyposner.org), [streetcorners](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/america-having-violence-wave-not-crime-wave/620234/?ref=andyposner.org), and in the other plastic flowers to brighten them up; our bodies are grown stiff with kneeling in prayer; we watch life bleed away all around us, screaming *Out, damned spot!* at no one in particular; we dream of Heaven and fear that Hell is murky, though in truth we believe in neither; we work so hard to build an estate which, at last, our children refuse.

And in a world where attention wanders without end we still pause, rapt, for a tearful moment, when the last rites are read, the dirges played; and lacking willpower, or time, or imagination to stop the killing, we become expert at lining up —so orderly, so civilized! —to pay our respects to the dead.