WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Juliet once posed the question, when she uttered, ‘What’s in a name?’

Yesterday, for a different reason, I was feeling quite the same.

I was reading about the Sandy Hook shooting, I was saddened and outraged

When the name of the man responsible jumped at me off the page.

I believe, once we hear the initial news of a tragedy, the who, the where, the when

There is no need to ever memorialize the murderer’s name again.

For I don’t believe the people responsible, the ones who are to blame

Deserve the right to immortality, or merit any fame.

They are the reason so many lives are left forever unfulfilled

And I don’t want to see their names next to the names of those they killed.

I think history should be saved for the innocents, theirs are the lives we should proclaim,

While the lunatics who killed them die without anyone remembering their names.

We should think of the feelings of the families, not the person who callously forsook them.

We should remember the lives of the people who died not the name of the person who took them.

If Shakespeare were alive today to witness such tragedy

I imagine his Juliet soliloquizing, ‘tis thy name that is my enemy.’

And as such she’d declare henceforth that name should forever be disclaimed.

Yes, perhaps that would be her the answer to the question ‘What’s in a name?’