Stunned

PUUUU PANJWAI, Afghanistan — Stalking from home
PUUUU to home, a U. S. Army sergeant methodically
PUUUU killed at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children,
PUUUU …early on Sunday.
PUUUUUUU —The New York Times, March 11, 2012

Saffron daffodils three and four deep
line the low-slung factory’s white-washed
wall like spectators along a parade route

watching as we wander to an art exhibit.
They have exploded three weeks early
and seem surprised to see our passing,

their breeze-tossed faces long rows
of ruffled O’s aglow in the spotlight
of the daylight-saving sun. We all

were stunned that mid-week morning
several oddly mellow days ago to awaken
to the Southwest desert’s weather skewed

toward winter Michigan, to children heading
for school in T-shirts and plastic sandals,
our spring relief reserved for late April

arriving in force in early March. It’s eerily
just like summer, with highs near eighty,
and as we walk I’m astounded by my body,

how it knows to bully my sullen disposition
to get over it as if I’d already survived
the blizzards, shoveling, and lingering slush.

But it’s also spring break and warmer by
fifteen degrees than Daytona or San Diego,
and last Sunday, even across the ice-cold lake,

short-sleeved Chicagoans shopped in droves,
and tulips in the short-fenced beds beside
the bus stops were already half-a-foot tall.

In sympathy I’ve warned my Afghani students
not to fall for this unseasonable withdrawal
of the arctic’s brutal jet-stream occupation,

that they likely haven’t seen the vicious last
of what assaults us every winter, what
most certainly will bewilder them once again.

Surreal Expulsion

PUT—for Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

Fourteen chairs loiter, emptied, no young bodies
adjusting for the next lesson, hand-raising,
class-clown antic, contemplative talk, pat show
of teen contempt, rhythm beaten with pencil, palm,
bouncing knee, jouncing heal, wise-crack, step
in the impossible problem never to be solved.
Instead, more of the same news, the same vows
taxiing the hellish hallways of feigned intention
but never taking off—the same dazed moments
of the dead. Perhaps their freed spirits now see
through the coal-black tunnel of some eternity
right into the next school’s beehive of victims.
Perhaps they still shadow their three steady mentors
who stood staunch ground in the slow-motion flow
of high-speed ammo. The clip of names shoots holes
clean through law’s callous gut—

PUT_CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCAaron, Helena, and Alex,
Carmen, Peter, Cara, Chris, and Meadow,
PUT_CCCScott, Alaina, Martin, Alyssa, and Nick,
Jamie, Luke, Gina, and “Guac” Joaquin—

PUT_CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCwhose roll call
claims only an absurd third of a minute, while
their totaled lives witnessed nearly 5 thousand
wheels of the moon through some 75 trillion miles.
But unlike the pull of that implacable moon,
the glib fever of ‘prayers and condolences’ can’t
turn the tide of memory’s radiating its fixed
fissures scored by shards of glass and bone.
Here, we’re left to settle the moonscape of Too Late
for those whose expelled footsteps befuddle us.
And lauding immortality soothes no better. We
know we relax at our children’s peril, run rash risk
of shoring up the open/closed-carry-frenzied fight,
take false hope in the bundles of white-washed bills.
Anthony Borges took five bullets to shield twenty
surviving friends, sacrificed his soccer stardom
because somehow he knew what he had to do.
His lacerated back and shattered femur scream
in a language we now must teach across America.