News & Views of Phillips Since 1976
Monday December 2nd 2024

TODAY MY HEART IS HEAVY

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

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