Lament for Charlie Kirk
“When you deliberately distort and selectively present the truth, you lie.”
—Charlie Kirk
I
This is a day of sorrow for the nation:
a day of shame and shock, of regret and reckoning,
when we bow our heads to humility
and stand stripped of excuses.
A light has been quenched,
a voice of faith and reason has been cut short.
II
Hatred, like a tempest, broke upon him,
seeking to smother hope,
to drown reason in rage,
to silence conviction with violence.
He wagered his life on truth—
believing that once it entered the field of contest,
clarity would prevail.
But some will not hear,
their hearts calcified,
their ears closed to reconsideration, reconciliation, redemption.
III
They profess a blind creed,
not the faith that comes by hearing the Word of God,
but the echo of their own arrogance—
proclaimed ex cathedra from the throne of Self,
kneeling in devotion before the papacy of Ego.
Such spirits seethe in malice:
slander is their weapon when reason falters,
and when slander fails, they reach for bullets.
A bullet—cheap, brutal, faceless, final—
the coward’s argument against truth.
IV
But truth is not contained in the chest of one man;
it cannot be buried in the lungs of a single voice.
It reverberates in the souls of the honest;
it resounds in the conscience of the courageous.
They thought it buried beneath the soil of indoctrination,
but, like Lazarus, it rose again,
grave clothes trailing, daring a nation to believe.
V
Faith, family, freedom—
these they sought to inter in the grave of contempt.
But again and again they rise,
specters that will not rest,
haunting tyrants who cannot chain them,
defying ideologues who cannot kill them.
VI
And so the cowards struck,
piercing the very cords of his witness.
But they cannot silence what God has spoken.
Charlie Kirk now thunders louder in death than he ever did in life.
VII
He lives in the voices of the young,
in the steadfast who will not yield,
in a people who have seen the price of truth
and count it worthy.
His martyrdom is not the end but the multiplying:
a seed fallen into the earth,
a harvest still to come.
VIII
Would that men would choose conversation over carnage,
respect over rage,}
humanity over hatred.
But the feckless cannot abide the daylight of debate;
their positions are fragile, flimsy, false,
and so they crouch behind rifle sights,
masking weakness with violence,
disguising cowardice with blood.
IX
Yet the truth will not die.
It has already gone into a tomb
and shattered it from within,
once for all, never to be contained.
The stone was rolled away,
the grave clothes left behind,
and death itself was disarmed.
