Eight
Photo credit: Talena Lachelle Queen- Seattle, WA (2014) Amethyst Kettrell
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?
Some of them were nine and ten
Some were 11, all of them are in heaven
Where they will take classes on
Visiting dreams, and guardian angelship,
There’ll be no lessons on guns,
There is no AK or AR quiz,
there is no big test on ammunition.
They'll be exempt from judgment and they'll be too young to ride the horses.
They should be learning to use patterns
to find the factors and multiples of numbers,
to convert and calculate units of measure not be the numbers,
not be counted in a litany of murders.
Photo credit: Talena Lachelle Queen- Barbour Park, Paterson, NJ (2018).
They should be reading new genres,
marveling in the myths,
listening to literary legends, folktales and fables,
They should be connecting to characters
and experiencing legendary events in their own lives.
They should not be the non-fiction horror added to the number 244.
They should be learning the truth about this nation,
they should be looking at the scientific processes of classification
They should be studying organisms,
and the motion of objects
-Except bullets and how they affect humans, no child needs to know that.
They should be learning about electricity and circuits,
rocks, fossils, and meteorology not whether there'll be an active shooter today.
They should be having spelling bees and learning about the place where they live,
where they live, where
they live
Eight year olds,
nine, ten, eleven year olds
should be discovering themselves as readers,
writers and researchers.
They should be storytellers, not headlines,
they should be alive
