The Daily Doggerel - On A Class Mate's Distant Suicide Poem by Bill Grace

I learned years after it happened
This this distant name had killed himself.
It was Ken who told me
What had happened,
Robert Leslie taught
It takes so much desperation
For this event.
The words of Jesus came:
"Forgive them they know not
What they do."
I was Y he was M or N
We knew each other
But we didn't know.
In a roadside break down situation
If there had been recognition
We would have stopped to help.
It makes me sad to think
With well less than one hundred
We didn't know a thing about each other,
Only a name.
There was so much busyness
So many other trajectories
Even in rural upstate new york
Not too far from Cornell's libraries
Where I did almost all my papers.