February 15, 2018
“The shooter went on a rampage’
“Students lie dead and bleeding in the halls”
“He had endless magazines,” the reporter said
“The kids were freaking out”
“He always had guns on him,” said a friend
“You could have predicted this”
Guns don’t kill people, people do, the NRA was heard to say
and spent their day
Writing checks
To crocodile teared congressman
Whose words tried to comfort another city
As parents cried over their children
And their friends who died
“This is a tragic day” we heard a newscaster say
A father embraced his daughter, a mother her son
They’d won this lottery of death
On this awful day
In a school northwest of Miami
Where have all the children gone?
Gone to flowers everyone
When will they ever care?
When will they ever dare?
Tomorrow again
The same despair
In a city or country
school somewhere
In bloody America
Land of the AK
Don’t take those guns away
Even as bullets rip the bodies of
daughters and sons
In cities and towns
Only in America
This poem, just another
piece of the literature of death
we poets will write till our dying breath
And the world will gasp with grief
Another wreath upon another child’s grave
Are we really the home of the brave?
..
Jay S Zimmerman is a writer, community and social justice advocate and an artist. He came to poetry from his life as a visual artist, composing poems to go with his art, finding as much joy in painting with words. Recently, he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Some of his work can be found in Matryoshka Poetry, Three Line Poetry, I am not a silent poet, Curly Mind and Flying Island as well as New Verse News, Quatrain, Fish and Rats Ass Review’s Love and Ensuing Madness.
I am not a silent poet 