1.
This is for all the murdered women:
I now lock my security door for you,
Because I know your personal lives,
Have been scattered for miles and miles,
And I know your legs are stiller than dawn,
And your voices are quieter than the wind.
2.
This is for all the murdered women:
We got to live when you could not,
And we will never know why that is,
That some are taken and others remain.
I listen to your broken fathers, who will
Will never smile or walk straight again.
I hear them say, "We never want
What happened to our daughter,
To happen to anyone else."
They take up causes in your names.
3.
This is for all the murdered women:
And their families who will never stop loving them.
If we who are living could
bring you back, you know that we would
do just that, to have your lovely faces,
grace this earth again ...
Instead this never ending, ever bloody ending,
That we can only imagine you in.
4.
This is for all the murdered women:
Who stare out from faded photographs.
We will not think of your final moments,
Only how very much you meant to us.
We, the lost families, will smile and pray again one day,
With tears as long as streaking rain across the valleys,
Of the still stones and beating sun where no bird sings.
We will not forget you or your lives:
You as a baby, with barely a history,
The world still a song in your heart.
You as a child, with your arm round your best friend,
And your sister, who is still alive today.
You as a future teenager, still optimistic,
and the grandchild that you never held.
What happiness was dragged away from us,
Into a car and found dead in the scrub?
But mostly, you were viciously tortured,
Predictably raped. A mother then wept,
"We are thankful that God gave her to us,
But as for the way, in which she was taken,
We try not to think too much about that."
5.
This is for all the murdered women:
Who the world gave too late and took too early.
I am sorry that I cannot name you ...
Her father pleads,"She's everything
You'd want a daughter to be."
She was a sister, a wife, a mother.
But she never made it home one day.
They found the red shoes of an auburn haired woman,
Covered In Mud. Undone. Her husband quietly wept,
"I will never miss the thrill of being near her."
6.
We now report the missing woman:
From the hooker, to the student,
To the white house intern.
"There was no indication as to why she
Would have gone without letting us know."
Years later, her skull in a shady gully,
By a lonely creek, of barely a trickle,
The jacket that she was last seen in.
The brother said, "We know she is dead.
We just want justice."
So we can rest in peace. Amen. Amen.
5.
This poem is for all the murdered women:
standing alone, this small sad poem.
If I could trade it for your smile,
your lovely hair, your sad bright eyes,
And the spirit that existed there,
... I would never write a poem again.
To live in a world, where I would never
have to write such words again...
But now that you are gone,
This poem, like a flower, one frail flower,
In your memory.
