Elegy- Isaac Satin

For Malcolm X

BY MARGARET WALKER

All you violated ones with gentle hearts;

You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak;

Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers,

And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes.

All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery bums

Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie,

Thumbing your noses at your burning red suns,

Gather round this coffin and mourn your dying swan.

Snow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face!

Beautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins!

Our blood and water pour from your flowing wounds.

You have cut open our breasts and dug scalpels in our brains.

When and Where will another come to take your holy place?

Old man mumbling in his dotage, crying child, unborn?

Walker, Margaret. "For Malcolm X." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 1 Jan. 1989. Web. 25 Sept. 2014. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/237164>

This elegy does not much align with the traditional form. The first stanza, with the exception of its last line, comprises the praise usually reserved for after the lamentation of the elegy's subject. Instead, the subject- being Malcolm X as well as his following- is lamented post-praise. The most unorthodox piece of this elegy, though, is the lack of solace or closure. It is not "out of order" like the praise and lamentation. It is simply not there, instead replaced with further lamentation posing the question of who can replace the titular character of the elegy. 

Certainly this poem explores loss. The speaker explores the essential question of how anyone could be replaced, especially when their name carries such heavy weight in the lives of others. Of course this question is even more important when it is someone with the practically gravitational influence on social and political thought as Malcolm X, but anyone who has experienced loss has asked this question to themselves and likely to those around them. The idea of the irreplaceable person is universal and central to the idea of loss, because if anyone was truly replaceable then they could never truly be lost.