Last year on Valentine’s day, my students were working on three of the stories which are alluded to in T. S. Eliot’s the Wasteland. On the way home that day, I listened to NPR’s reporting of the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where seventeen people were killed, and another seventeen injured. Since the Columbine High School, Every time there is another school shooting, I think about the students I teach everyday: the joy, trust, hope, and curiosity they bring with them into the world. As news of another killing happens, I cannot avoid thinking about them bleeding out on the floor of my classroom. I am horrified at the “solutions” offered by our political leaders: arm the teachers, “harden” the schools, conduct live shooter drills as casually as fire drills. Last year, I responded personally, the way I respond to most of what troubles me by writing into the horror. A few weeks later Shantih Journal ( https://shantihjournal.org/issue-2-2/) put out a call for writing about social justice after the March for Our Lives protest in Washington. I sent them the poem I wrote the day of the shootings, which they graciously published. I would like to think that there has been a change in people’s political will to do something that will end the slaughter of our children, but I fear we are too mired in sclerotic thinking to change. Here is the poem I wrote:
Today’s Lesson
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”
–T. S. Eliot
my students work over the abstract
idea of redemption in three stories
as a preparation for the wasteland
which we will read for the next class
one thousand miles away students
hide as their classmates are killed
and we are told there is nothing
nothing we can do except pray
prayers are useless balms for the dead
and pale recompense for the living
who must clean blood from the walls
and mix memory into the earth
devoid of hope near an open door
we are in a hell we have created
(February 14, 2018)
