By BARB TILSEN
May 25, 2022
Today my heart is heavy
Whenever the news arrives of children dying
The six year old found in the trunk of a car
Shot by his mother
While that story is still freshly told
the News brings yet more details
of the shooting yesterday
with the horror of deja vu
Nineteen children in Texas
2nd graders
3rd graders
4th graders
Beautiful and precious
Murdered
By an 18 year old
With an assault rifle he bought
On his birthday
Leaving his childhood behind
In bloody footprints
Bringing haunting memory
Of another school shooting
of our young children
Carried in Sandy Hook’s river of tears
Bringing the stark truth
that lies at the center
of our country’s stalemated inaction
We are a nation that allows our children
To be murdered
It is our legacy
It is our history
The heartbreaking picture comes to the fore
Large numbers of beloved Native children
Stolen away to boarding school
Portrait of the stolen lives
In that sea of young faces
The stolen promise
The stolen land
Building the wealth of our country
We are a nation that murders its children
With the facade of personal freedom
When we allow laws
Protecting the violence of the gun
With more violence of the gun
That make it easy, possible
for the sick, the wounded
the disturbed to arm themselves
With weapons of war
To use in the halls of learning
Sacrificing
The sacred promise of the child
When will we ever learn
When will we ever change
And meet this reckoning
with the courage and the will
This moment requires
Our wounded world requires
Today my heart is heavy
©️2022 Barbara Tilsen
