C.E. Shuford and the death of a president

Much has been written in recent days about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 50 years ago this Friday. Much more will be written in the days to come as the country continues to struggle to make sense of the senseless, to understand the inexplicable and to heal a wound that still scars the fabric of American society.

 In 1965, only two years after the death of the president, a professor at North Texas State University – now the University of North Texas – sat down to write about the events in Dallas that bright November day and in the heartbreaking days that followed.

 C.E. Shuford, known affectionately to generations of his students as “Papa,” was the founder of the journalism program at NTSU. A former newspaperman, he was a fierce presence in the classroom who demanded from his student journalists precision, clarity and a strict adherence to the rules of grammar and punctuation. A misspelled name meant an automatic F in the course.

 But a few of us knew something about Papa that he never discussed in his classes. He was a poet, and quite a good one, too. His poems first were published in a national magazine in 1933, and he already had won a national poetry award when he felt compelled to write about the assassination. The poem he produced won him another national prize, the William Marion Reedy Award from the Poetry Society of America.

 Here is an excerpt from “The Death in Our Family,” the section entitled, “The Walking Time.”

 So comes a slow, a walking time for grief,

a time of measured footfalls, rolling drums,
creaking cassons, and the clop, clop
of horses’ hooves.
                           And the silence falls
and fills the city with a sobbing sigh,
the long and measured breathing of the men
that still draw breath and stand in sunlight,
watching the passing of the fallen prince,
who tastes the sweet, sad air no longer.
                                                  Tears
water the earth behind him who had asked
no tears, and grief burdens the feet that gather
at the stations on his road to sleep.
                                                   There is
a place for him to lie beneath the flag,
a place for him to pause to rest, and all
that night the feet shuffle slowly past.
Children come; men and women come;
his princess comes, and in the darkest night
returns; it is a walking time for grief,
an echo time for sorrow like the sound
of distant cannon booming in the night.