Arrests in the death of 11-year-old Roman Lopez bring back a poem from the late 1970s when we searched for missing boys later found murdered:
He Was Wearing a Yellow T-Shirt
We search for childpaths in the woods.
Where would he go?
Cedars bunch gray and blind
with cobwebs.
Berries and honeysuckle
shoulder up higher
than a man. Not a boy. Birds
only sing from the tops and edges.
Warblers, orioles,
flicks of yellow
foliage trick the eye. Not
a boy.
We could be in Transylvania,
the Yucatan. Backwoods
of a suburb.
Where is he?
who walked out of his house
and down the civilized street
and out of the world?
*
He’s finding the way roots
pull the red clay over,
and quilted creepers: every longbone
loosened from its muscle,
moving the way stones and twigs do,
the intricate small bones of fingers
easing out of their joints.
By fall
it will all be second nature
to him, how the blond hairs
scatter. When it rains
won’t matter. Snow melts and runs away,
kid-stuff. And spring
shoves up a few yellow tatters,
flowers that never grew
on a stalk.
~ Taylor Graham
from Casualties (Coal City Review) & Taylor Graham: Greatest Hits (Pudding House Publications)