Today we arrived at school without nineteen of the little ones,
The littlest ones, eight years old.
Eight years old,
Eight years old is too young to drive
too young to go to prom, too short to ride the rollercoaster
too young to know better, two years short of the double digits ages, 
but old enough to add to the number 244
That is the number of school shootings before Robb Elementary 
When will it end?

Since childhood
I’d watch the rain droplets
race one another down the window
I’d watch droplets swallow one another in the 
race along the pane

Our car zoomed along the highway, the
speed and wind forcing 
Crashes among the droplets against one another
The clouds would be blotched against the sky, 
grey and white

When I see the word Palestine

When I hear the place Gaza 

I want to sleep 

I cannot rest but I want to sleep 

It is fitful I thrash 

My breathing is shallow and hoarse

My feet are cold my head is hot 

My skin crawls tickled by the sweat of my worry

I close my eyes and tumble in darkness

I see black and red and brown and grey 

Falling like concrete shattered into sand and dust

I am awake and I cry to dream

There is a certain cruelty here.

It draws parasites, dark beetles, pregnant flies, and vultures

scurrying, poking, feeding, and positioning 

over what appears to remain

It emanates a sickly sweet stench

burns and irritates the eyes like dust and smoke

and echoes hurt and horror in the twisted 

unrecognizable lines of a decomposing thing

So that even the least kindness

a thank you, a patience, an unconscious consideration

momentarily shifts the gaze and quickens the lungs 

with furtive memory of grace, of the unpolluted

It may even rend tired flesh to expose raw and solemn bones

but like all rotten things

The cruelty here cannot last. 

Not for always. Not forever.