It is traditional,
like love letters
and candy,
we have massacres here:
red and black and white
color our Valentine's Day,
cupid's arrows replaced by bullets,
the romance of the gun
and an affair with Death.
It is traditional,
like a daily ritual
practiced in tiny classrooms
and taught in auditoriums,
and workplace videos to remind you
your co-worker could go berserk,
so please take time to think how
you should run, hide, fight.
We have massacres here
for the old and young with no exemption,
our one truly inclusive
experience, and some
get to see two or more
in even one short lifetime.
Here there be massacres--
a feature of our landscape like amber waves of grain,
only waves of pain
and passersby that jest at scars
not having felt a wound.
And it happens so many times in a week
we can hardly speak to it,
other than to say it happens and something goes horribly awry--
but we never quite answer: why?
2 comments:
I'm fairly certain you don't want to hear that that is a beautiful piece anymore than I want to call it beautiful, so how about beautifully written, truthful, and spot-on. I'm sorry you had to write it, while I admire you for writing it. If this is inappropriate, it doesn't have to post, I'm just telling you.
Yeah, it's hard to think about the subject matter as beautiful, and for me, if I write a poem, it sometimes means I have trouble discussing that thing in prose anymore. It just...keeps happening. We just keep having stories about mass shootings. It is madness.
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