“…FBI insiders swear Kennedy is alive!” Weekly World News 2/24/92
…the tabloid headlines read:
JOHN F. KENNEDY STILL LIVES
…and claimed he lingers, crippled
and bound
to a wheelchair in an undisclosed
retreat; a picture, hazy and unclear,
evidenced the fact.
I pondered, only briefly, gullibility and how
our need for headlines allows that anything
and everything is real and then
forgot
the incident until today
when reading headlines of a world
that hungers after war, starves
for food and thrives
on hate and avarice and all the multiplicity
of things that make the fabric
of our world too coarse
to wear, too thin
for warmth; raggedly,
we’ve come these years
since the shot
rang out
and history happened on a Dallas street.
Perhaps
the kernel of absurdity
is truth
the seed of truth
the greater lie
the bullet struck
and just
perhaps
Kennedy lives
and the whole world died.
Susan A. Katz (All Rights Reserved, from the book “Dreaming Missouri”)