I plan to write a poem at lunch about the death of the little girl on I-25 yesterday. It won’t be about the death directly, but about the sadness of the loss. I’ve thought about writing a series of poems exploring perspectives, and this might be the first.

(Later that day)

Instead of writing the poem, I struggled with the moral question of whether it is right for me to use this incident for inspiration. I’ve done something like this before, in the poem “It Could Have Been a Masterpiece,” about the death of one of my college friends, but that was a grown person, not a three-year old child. The child’s name has been released to the press — Fatima Guadalupe-Guerrero — and I would like to dedicate the poem to her memory. But am I being too invasive by doing so? Is there something fundamentally wrong with using the death of a child to make an observation about the different perspectives of society? If I write this poem, am I reducing her death to a supporting point for an argument, or am I elevating it to something more than just a dreadfully unfortunate accident?