Again, in an attempt to establish the humanity of the victims and remember them as individual people and not as statistics or reports or dates or groups, I wrote an original poem about victims of the earthquake who we might not normally think about.

Mother Stars

The dark comes,
my heart sinks,
I look at the sky
searching for relief.

The light from your eyes,
starlight.
Yet all the stars in the sky
are still not enough.

Their light is not your love,
not your hands,
not your heartbeat against my ear
as you hug me
while I cry,
even though it tries.

Transient light,
it’s exactly that.
hope
love
transient.

I need you mother.
Going on
only seems to be
going up.

Matt O’Rourke

This poem is from the perspective a young child who lost his mother in the earthquake. I don’t want to go into too much detail about the poem itself, because explaining a poem is like explaining a painting. However, I will say that at least for me personally, whenever I think about victims of disasters I think about adults, and I never really imagine children as the victims. I especially don’t really think about children who have lost their parents as victims of a disaster, but when studying this earthquake I sort of came to realize that, in fact, these cases may be some of the most tragic that result from any disaster. Therefore, I wanted to write a poem that brings this to attention and hopefully helps me to think about, reflect upon, and eventually commemorate the children who lose their parents in natural disasters. It really struck me hard when I started to think about this so it only felt appropriate to write something about it that remembers and identifies these children as victims of the earthquake and all other disasters as well.