In which we need pragmatists and prophets

We need pragmatists. And we need prophets.We need policy

makers. And we need poets. We need silence. And we need anger.

Lament, go ahead, and I need someone to say it, too, just once, once out loud:

what in the actual fuck has happened here? And no one

can answer me, insufficient despairing. In the night, we are the borderless chorus of mamas,

we need a song, and so we hum old lullabies for empty beds with old Tinkerbell sheets.

We’re watching with those who weep and wait for morning dawn relief, it will

not come and our marrow weeps underneath the tragic optimism of our routine.

We want to snatch our tinies up and run away somewhere, anywhere

surely there is a place we can hide from this horror, the terrors of death.  But we wait

until the bell, we turn off the news, we make spaghetti. I stood outside

my daughter’s classroom yesterday afternoon in the cold sunshine, early, and her face appeared

at the classroom window, grinning gap-toothed, waving,

and I stood quiet on the cracked pavement, because

I was waving back, relieved, and another mother sits vacant and empty

on the floor of a fire house, wondering dull what to do

with her hands now, they have no hair to smooth, no face to wipe,

no pages to turn, that will smooth, wipe, turn this, trying not think

how her baby was scared and she was not there, and I don’t know what to do for her,

so I cry again, and I curse, and pray for peace that passes all understanding.

We need the pragmatists with policy , we need the prophets streaked in ash,

We need the God who sees, and God with us.

Light a candle, light a candle, say

a prayer, redeem us, save us, see us, help us, love us, comfort us.

We need psalmists and pastors and policy makers, we are hungry for justice,

for someone to somehow protect us, and someone must lift us, we’ve soaked

the ground with our tears, though the earth be removed, and the mountains

carried to the sea, and our own babies die in kindergarten classrooms, yet, maybe

tomorrow, someday, perhaps, we will praise again, not today.