Sometimes it ends right before you can say goodbye,
When the heart starts the healing of a sickness gone awry,
Maybe the slowest shot is truth, please comfort me with lies.

Sitting in solemn silence, come together today,
For every one of my brothers was born in Blacksburg, VA.

And to say honor and respect is to utter 32 names,
Helpless to the moment, afar still feeling friends maimed.

One thousand ways to bring them back. Can't.
Gone or passed on, they still hear the chants.

Of the Hokie Nation, sorrow through elation,
Hold me brother, I will not fight.

Embrace the thirty third; it could have been alright,
For even a hardened heart of madness, seeks potential light.

But in the windless shadows, one weeps without noise,
Only to explode in tears of crimson, muzzle fire his only voice.

A choice too hurried effectively buried the whole earth,
These gusts sweeping through the valley spread love, for all it is worth.

Find us wanting for you, lost souls alone together,
Cries from one campus rise above melding with others, alive forever.

The only life I feel now is from the Hokie at my side,
Not an open campus, for in only firm embrace do I reside.

And to prevail is to sail on the wings of those fallen,
For by their grace and surrender, do our hearts beat swollen.

Thirty three deaths ring out loud to countless lifetimes,
Find your own soul, so far I can hardly write mine.

Exactly where we want to be, is never where we are,
But Virginia Tech is where I am, where love is never far.