Tim Miller (an American poet sent me this poem that he reads at the bottom. I have a pleasure in reading good poetry for the sake of the writing but this is particularly valuable as I am reading it in recovery from an operation.

Today’s poem is the first in the book, and one of the hardest to write (and perhaps the hardest to read), Dylan Klebold’s Crush. I was only out of high school for two years when the Columbine High School shooting took place, and it took almost twenty years, and becoming a father, for me to write anything about it.

In many of the accounts of Dylan Klebold’s final year before the shooting, his attachment to one or more girls in his class comes up again and again, and the poem imagines one of those crushes, now in middle age, still with no idea what she meant to a boy who became a murderer.

In part, the poem imagines a situation most of us can see ourselves in (having a crush from a distance) ending up being forgotten, and in its place is a horror and a tragedy few of us can imagine being a part of.