Laura Bradbury’s Bones
By Barbara Sweeney
It was easy for me to imagine
your mother assembling your pitiful details:
D.O.B., last-seen-wearing, date and place
of abduction, the picture of your round face
that would never age
past three-and-a-half.
You were the same age then as my daughter,
the same thick blonde hair
cropped like a bowl. My daughter, who now does three-place multiplication
and sings the lead in the sixth grade play.
Salty, sickening, a kinship of fear
forms around every woman who thinks she protects
her own children by searching for ones
who are lost.
I kept up my vigil.
watched for you in passing cars,
in crowds at the circus.
I followed the screams of children in closed up vans
to make sure they weren’t yours.
You turned up –
not as a twelve-year-old
on the brink of the sixth grade,
but as a small, perfect skull
not far from the desert restroom
where your brother probably said,
“Wait here.”
And like opening a child’s lunch box
at the end of the day,
your mother turns at last to find
the hard parts uneaten.
The thermos
dry as a bone.
May 6th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
An interesting poetic tribute to a terribly sad period in our lives. For your edification, the only partial remains of a very small piece of skullcap was ever found, and it was located miles from where we were camping in an area that surprisingly had been searched over and over for months by professional search parties. The case is still unsolved and we believe as did many investigators that little Laura was abducted, and then months later dumped at that site………
Lauras father,
Mike
April 24th, 2010 at 6:13 am
my stomach turned as i finished your poem. the further i got down the page the more i worried ‘how is the family going to feel’, ‘what if Laura’s dad sees this’…& sadly he was the first to see it. this breaks my heart!
i’m not one to judge people on their artistic view of bringing an idea to light, but my gosh!
in my opinion this would be the perfect example for you to return to when you need that reminder to check your facts entirely prior to finding an artistic take on such a tragic event in this communities lives.
April 26th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
Dear Christine,
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said.
This story hit me particularly hard because one of my daughters was the same age as the child that was lost. And all I had to work with was what was reported in the press. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of seeing some small article in the press that strikes a chord. Often, the story vanishes after that one appearance. I was marked in some way by what this family went through, to the point that I wanted to write about it, wanted more people to acknowledge the loss, the not knowing, so the story and this little girl did not just end when the press dropped it.
I guess I think that only by increasing our awareness and our sensitivity to each other can we help to create a world where these things do not become ordinary happenings that can be easily dismissed. And if that’s not what art is for, then what is?
I will share this with you: what I learned after her father’s comment was that there was no need to use the girl’s real name. It would have been the same poem without that. I took a chance using it and I wouldn’t do that again.
Thanks for commenting.