IN REMEMBRANCE

(In the poetry form called "villanelle")

by the Gesu School students of Room 16

No one could have imagined what would happen that day
It was a day unlike any other
No one knew students would become like prey

It is hard to say
Why someone would kill all those sisters and brothers
No one could have imagined what would happen that day

Thirty-two people lay
Taken from their fathers and mothers
No one knew students would become like prey

Their souls went away
In tragedy they were smothered
No one could have imagined what would happen that day

They died in a painful way
Now they sleep under white covers
No one knew students would become like prey

Their memories will forever stay
All different faces, all different colors
No one could have imagined what would happen that day
No one knew students would become like prey.

We are grieved by what happened at Virginia Tech and deeply troubled by the inhumanity of the gunman. His own family bears so much anguish as do the families of all those killed.

Those of us with distance from the tragedy must begin to search through the story of what happened to find something to get us through the confusion and doubt about our future. We let the sacrificial death of Professor Liviu Librescu inform our grief. He protected his students from the gunman in the corridor by blocking the door of his classroom and urging them to climb out the windows. There is little doubt that this professor saved many of his students from certain death.

When Professor Librescu was a young boy, his family suffered brutally in the Holocaust and later he refused membership in the Communist party in Romania at great cost to his professional career. He knew about crisis and suffering. Finally he found in Virginia a hopeful place to pursue his life and his career. For these reasons he knew how to answer when the ultimate call came to his classroom. I imagine him being the first to understand the triumph of his sacrifice as he succumbed to one of the gunman's bullets.