~Remembering Hawk~

By Catt Kingsgrave-Ernstein

I heard about you today, first time in years.
It took me most of the night to get around to feeling tears.
They didn't fall: just hung there blurring everything together.
Black, white, wrong, right, depth, height, day, night...

Good God man, don't you remember when we were gonna save the world?
How we'd laugh in the face of the foulest night and live to see dawn unfurl?
You were a hawk of the morning, a knight of the sun,
A savior, a searcher, and one of my dearest friends...my only friends.
And when the last chord ends, who'se gonna remember?

You know you snuck off without leaving me a picture?
I don't have anything to point to, to look at, to tell them "that's him."
But what the hell. It wouldn't matter if I did.
'Cause a picture from then would be a lie, and a picture from now would have ice in your eyes
Or blood. Or something else I never wanted to see there. Be there.
Are you free there where you are?

Good God man, I can remember when right and wrong meant more than life:
It didn't matter the pain or the loss or the gain when the motive was worth the strife
We were blades of the righteous, the promise of dawn
Crusaders, avengers, and children with armor on. But now you're gone.
And when the song plays on, who'se gonna remember?

Remember Us, you, and what we wanted to prove,
And the reasons we fought, and the reasons we strove
And the lengths we would go to see justice was done
And the love and the lies and the battles we won
And the battle you lost...

I will remember, my friend. And I hope that can be enough.
It's all I can do now. But Hawk brother, I will remember you.

*****

Kon Hawk was a 'volunteer brother' from my High School days. Together with a handful of other similarly deluded hormonal nutcases, we found a collective sort of sanity through the Hell which is High School. Over the years after school, we drew apart. Sometimes I would hear of him -- bad things, he'd started using Ice, he'd taken up with a blood gang, he was alone and sad. Good things -- he was clean, he was working, he was still in love with Her, and found purpose in his life, even if she couldn't return his feelings. Then came the news that he'd been murdered. He was stabbed in a convenience store when he refused to sell a 16 year old a case of beer. I wrote this stream-of-consciousness rant on the unfairness of his death, because out of all us would-be heroes, he was really the most heroic. I love him, I miss him, and I hope he's found peace in whatever place he's found himself, because he sure as hell deserved it.