The main theme and article of my website each month is intended to reflect a particular train of thought I am on as it relates to society or my own world.  But rarely is it personal.  

This month I am dredging up a poem I wrote about a girl I knew who was murdered by one of our classmates.  I think I am prompted to do so because every year about this time I have dreams about her.  In fact, this poem was inspired by a dream I had about her when I just discovered her fate.

She is the first causality of my graduating class and was named Kytrina.  She disappeared the last few months of our senior year and was missing for sometime, presumed dead.  A year or so later her body was discovered by a jogger in a wooded area near Lake Grapevine.  

I always rather liked Kytrina.  I knew her fairly well and to my knowledge she was never a dancer.  I remember coming across the newspaper articles about her murder which I have kept. When you are fresh out of high school those things that teach you early lessons of mortality stick with you.  I had a dream one night where I was in strange surroundings and Kytrina was dancing.  I was sitting next to a radio playing music that she danced to and I was trying to make it clearer. That is how I will remember her, not as a girl from high school whose life was cut short by the inexplicable madness of murder, but as a dancer in starlight.

 

Kytrina the dancer

Steps out of the tempo

Between beats of the music

That died years ago

 

I tune and I turn

To clear the reception

She’s beyond the detection

Of my mind’s radio

 

A blanket of starlight

Will serve as her stage

Where she’ll dance on forever

And not add to her age.

 

In moments of passing

When my brain fills with static

I’ll receive the transmission

Shot here from past.

 

A faint trace of music

Will remind me she’s dancing

Amidst the shining blue fire

from her starlight cast.

© 2002 Michael Haddon