American Morning: June 12, 2016

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.