Vox Populi
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Rachel Trousdale & Charles W. Brice: Two Elegies for Renée Nicole Good
The End at its Beginning by Charles W. Brice
On tv a man in South Vietnam,
a man we were fighting for, walked
out of a building with another man,
thin, afraid, and handcuffed. The
South Vietnamese man pulled out
a revolver and shot the handcuffed
man in the head. Blood shot out
of his skull like a grisly geyser.
It’s rare that right and wrong are displayed so
clearly. Fifty-nine years later I sit in front of my tv
and watch an ICE agent shoot a woman in the face
three times while she drives away from him.
Her last words were, “I’m not mad at you.”
I think of long dead Germans caught in the Bardo.
Are they wagging their fingers at us?
Now you know what it felt like, they say,
with mouths long silent from decay.
Now you know helplessness.
Now you know evil.
—
List of Possible Causes of My Death by Rachel Trousdale
Probably cancer. Otherwise—
prematurely—sooner than the cells
themselves would instigate—
let’s hope for death by bird:
craning my neck to catch a glimpse
of an unfamiliar chevroned breast,
maybe I will fall from the back
of a motorcycle-taxi, from the window
of a subalpine chateau. Alternately,
increasingly, could it be a bullet,
three bullets, fired by a man in woodland
camouflage on a suburban street
who correctly sees me as the enemy?
How I object to dying
that way or any way, when the amaryllis
in the kitchen is just opening, when the skates
we bought are still unused; how wasteful
to dispose of a whole mind, any mind,
with its stir of ambivalence, curiosity,
desire; how nonsensical of Rupert Brooke
to celebrate heroic death, then fall
to a mosquito, two weeks too soon
to be machine gunned at Gallipoli.
Byron sweating and freezing
at Missolonghi. They didn’t get
what they signed up for. None of us do.
You can’t choose heroism, you can only not choose
to stay home, to drive past. Profligate world,
tossing aside the meticulous irreplicable
assemblage of experience that makes
a self. How wasteful fear is. What courage
it takes, sometimes, to move, to smile, to say
pleasantly to the mask, I’m not mad at you.
~~~
“The End at its Beginning” copyright 2026 Charles W. Brice.
“List of Possible Causes of My Death” copyright 2026 Rachel Trousdale
Charles W. “Charlie” Brice is a Pittsburgh-based retired psychoanalyst known for his numerous poetry collections (like The Ventriloquist). His most recent is A Brief History of the Sixties (Alien Buddha Press, 2026).
Rachel Trousdale is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Her poetry book Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem won the Cardinal Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the New England Book Award. Her latest scholarly book is Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry.
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I had to wait until this morning to read these poems knowing they would bring tears to my eyes. They did, both for the catastrophe they recount and reflect upon and for their beauty made out of pain and loss.
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Thanks for choosing not to look away, Luray. Sometimes that’s a difficult thing to do.
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Two outstanding poems, important poems. And, yes, I have heard it so often: “The German’s must have known.” “Why did the Germans let this happen?” Now you know.
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Now we know.
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I read your other post first and failed to find words for an adequate response until I read this post. Both poems say so much so well. I will continue to protest, but it gets harder and harder to leave my bed.
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It’s okay, Barbara. You are participating here in the VP community. That counts too.
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I almost couldn’t read these two poems today, but I guess it would have been even more painful not to. The fact that this murder took place not quite a week ago staggers me … I now feel as though I have never lived in a country where this particular horror did not happen. I now know my privilege does not protect me from being murdered while I exercise the so-called right granted by the First Amendment (of a Constitution being systematically dismantled by the current administration). I now believe I am risking my life when I object to what has taken place in this country since the inauguration of a real monster in January 2025. At the two protests I took part in on Saturday, how could I not say to myself, “I am exactly as safe as Renée Nicole Good was” — namely, not at all safe? In the part of the Bay Area where I live, I have yet to spot ICE agents, but that is just dumb luck on my part. Will I continue to put my life on the line? Yes. Will it help for Americans to keep standing up for our beliefs? I hope so.
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Thanks, Annie. I feel exactly as you do. Thanks for expressing it so well.
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The two poems begin with the same need to respond to Renee Good’s murder, but the two poets create completely different elegies. Charlie’s poem takes up the historical and political meaning of the tragedy while Rachel’s poem examines the death in terms of the poet’s own mortality. I find the contrast fascinating.
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These are wonderful, yet heartbreaking poems. And how sad it is that they are so necessary in this world.
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Oh, yes. Sad and necessary.
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Thanks to both of these writers for their poetic acts of courageous witness. What anguish in trying to speak the unspeakable, yet knowing how essential it is to break that dichotomy, seeking compassion while creating a space for hope in a time of weeping.
How wasteful fear is. What courage
it takes, sometimes, to move, to smile, to say
pleasantly to the mask, I’m not mad at you. -Rachel Trousdale
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Yes, “courageous witness” is what’s needed.
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Thank you, Rachel Trousdale and Charlie Brice. Beautiful, necessary poems.
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I find it interesting how different these two brilliant poems are.
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Yes, different. And yet how resonant they both are. Mighty powerful.
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