Bringing it Home

A first poem about school shootings because writing is a way for me to work things out.

Bringing it home

Unless you teach children
you may not
know this:
that sometimes
late.at.night
especially
after another school shooting
dreaming teachers
hear the classroom door burst open
into a startled silence
panicked teachers
wake up sweating
after the flash
after we
throw ourselves
in front of the gun,
placing ourselves
between it and our kids –
screaming to them,
Run.Run.Run!
Hearts pounding.
Our dream-blind eyes.
The chairs overturned.
The reading corner a jumble of books.
Our bodies on the floor.
It all seems
like dark magic, something too evil; to utter
these words might conjure
a too-common unthinkable, to bring it
home.
An image pauses in my mind:
the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary rushes
from a mundane meeting
out into the hallway,
her flesh and blood confront a gun
intended
for the battlefield.
A first-grade teacher,
just out of school, stands between
the muzzle
and her cowering children.
You say that I have a too-active imagination,
that this would never happen here.
Perhaps.
But it happened there and
there and there and there and there
which is here
unless I place it
over there,
far from home,
mistaking their loss for
my safety
until
late.at.night
after another school shooting
their ghosts
shake me awake and whisper:
Do something.

– Steve Peterson