Katherine Mooney Brooks
​Image by Rachel Nickerson from Unsplash                                                                                     
Katherine Mooney Brooks received her MFA in poetry and nonfiction from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she served as managing editor of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. Brooks has previously received a Sewanee Writers’ Conference MFA scholarship in poetry. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Image, and Tusculum Review. She is the Director of Education at the Science Museum of Western Virginia.
ELEGY FOR TOMMY MOONEY

               1938-1960

What might have been the last thing you saw,
not grain feed or silo walls too high

to ever reach? I want it to be
your brother’s arms, his mouth just above

the ladder from which you fell, your name
on his lips. You were six years younger

than I am now. Still, I imagine you,
my hand on the wall of this dark cave

in County Cork, alone, and always
wanting to touch all that escapes me.

I have flown across the Atlantic
to be nearer to this soil, our name.

Envelope of umber void, the mouth
of this place didn’t frighten me until

I remembered the newspaper, your
obituary, I remembered

the image of you falling into
endless corn grain, how even with your

brother’s hands brushing the top of your
head, you must have felt defenseless there.

Here, in the place of your blood, the place
that you will never see, I’m thinking

of all the hands that felt for you through
the granule, the men who hurried down

the ladder to get to you, your brother’s
screaming are you there? and you, upright,

fifteen minutes later, somewhere in
all that corn, sunken deep, lifeless.

The Wednesday after your death,
your mother carefully cut out

your face and name from The Troy Record
beneath the headline—TROJAN FALLS.

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