It is a most difficult task to make sense of violence, particularly when it often seems unceasing. There have been numerous horrific acts of murder recently, and in trying to write about them, it feels important to see these events not only as individual incidents but to also make the connections between them, both in why they happen and how we process them. The following is a poem I wrote in response to the bloody and heartbreaking first week in July, 2016.
The Killing Fields Of Home
On July 4th,
when I was trying to make sense
of the bombings in Medina and Baghdad
on the very same day that the not so United States of America
was ritually celebrating what we call independence,
with colorful bombs bursting in air,
it seemed really important to remember that
the children who saw real bombs were shouting not with glee
but with fear before bleeding to death,
so I wrote haikus about that,
little poems like the children who died–
one for Medina,
Bombs bursting in air,
bodies explode, people die–
no celebration
and one for Baghdad,
Car bomb in Baghdad,
the twenty five kids who died
did not like fireworks
and I thought I had done my duty as a poet,
but then I read that dozens of people were shot
in Chicago over the holiday weekend
for who knows what reasons and they were bleeding too
and we haven’t even caught our breath since Orlando
and it occurred to me that maybe I needed to write a longer poem,
then Alton Sterling and Philando Castile
were gunned down by the police
because the color of their skin was a crime
and Melissa Harris-Perry wrote about how that feels
as a suicide note that I can’t stop reading
on the heels of the Chilcot Inquiry that minces no words
blaming Tony Blair for lying to his country about the Iraq war
while in this country we turn endless battle into
an anthem and Bush and Cheney just smirk
as a veteran of war, taught to kill in defense of our country,
shoots at the police in Dallas and more blood is spilt
and they send in a robot to take him out
which prompts Donald Trump to want a photo op with the NYPD
and I’m wondering if a sonnet is adequate
when my morning paper tells me that there have been
ten gang killings in ten months in the county where I live
and they have a column too about the child
of a woman who was killed by her boyfriend
and someone says we should all remember that
sometimes the police help and he tells a story
about a police officer who helped a lady repair her mailbox
and that was mighty nice of her, and I mean that sincerely,
but I’m thinking that sounds like a bandaid story
when we need a tourniquet because
a GOP Congressman says there are a lot more steps to be taken
before they will vote on gun control legislation
and I’m wondering how many steps there could really be
from his office to the floor to take a vote and when are we going to
quit playing six degrees of separation and take action
and in the time I have been writing this,
more people have been killed,
and I cannot type fast enough to keep up,
or even pause long enough
to pretty up this poem that cannot find its end.
–Lucinda Marshall, © 2016
