American Morning:
June 12, 2016
twelve American sentences, after
Ginsberg
Sudden jerk in the beat and the dance
grows frenetic,
automatic.
His clip holds thirty rounds—
he erases thirty names and then
reloads.
I’ve been shot at the club losing blood love you all
—victim’s Facebook post
It took time to get inside and count the dead,
bodies shielding bodies.
The impulse is to cradle the hurt, even
with bullets still flying.
Someone flying over
could map what’s lost:
one light turns on, another.
A mother posts to the club’s page:
please, has anyone seen
my daughter?
Gunman’s father
says he saw
gay men kiss:
once two dared
to lean toward love.
Sunday morning, lines wend
around the block, strangers
extending bare arms.
Just before: hands up
in wild abandon; then
one latecomer
enters.
Liked math, kind to animals,
made the best bread—but that’s
all over now.
“In the face of hate and violence,
we will love one another.”
This.
*
I’ve been having a lot of fun writing daily poems about classic television as part of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, a fundraiser for a wonderful nonprofit publisher. Yesterday’s tragedy forced me to break from lighter work to focus on the horror unfolding in Orlando, Florida. Business as usual does violence to those who are hurting, so I offer this poem in acknowledgement of the deadliest mass shooting in American history.
As a technical note, the form is a series of American sentences; invented by Allen Ginsberg, these are haiku-length (seventeen-syllable) sentences. The final (broken) sentence is from President Obama’s address on the incident.
Mark Davis created the original artwork in honor of the victims of the tragedy.
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