Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz by Matthew Olzmann

Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz

 

You whom I could not save,

Listen to me. 

 

Can we agree Kevlar

backpacks shouldn’t be needed

 

for children walking to school? 

Those same children

 

also shouldn’t require a suit

of armor when standing

 

on their front lawns, or snipers

to watch their backs

 

as they eat at McDonalds.

They shouldn’t have to stop

 

to consider the speed

of a bullet or how it might

 

reshape their bodies. But

one winter, back in Detroit,

 

I had one student

who opened a door and died. 

 

It was the front

door to his house, but

 

it could have been any door,

and the bullet could have written

 

any name. The shooter

was thirteen years old

 

and was aiming

at someone else. But

 

a bullet doesn’t care

about “aim,” it doesn't

 

distinguish between

the innocent and the innocent,

 

and how was the bullet

supposed to know this

 

child would open the door

at the exact wrong moment

 

because his friend

was outside and screaming

 

for help. Did I say

I had “one” student who

 

opened a door and died? 

That’s wrong.

 

There were many. 

The classroom of grief

 

had far more seats

than the classroom for math

 

though every student

in the classroom for math

 

could count the names

of the dead. 

 

A kid opens a door. The bullet

couldn’t possibly know,

 

nor could the gun, because

“guns don't kill people,” they don't

 

have minds to decide

such things, they don’t choose

 

or have a conscience,

and when a man doesn’t

 

have a conscience, we call him

a psychopath. This is how

 

we know what type of assault rifle

a man can be,

 

and how we discover

the hell that thrums inside

 

each of them. Today,

there’s another

 

shooting with dead

kids everywhere. It was a school,

 

a movie theater, a parking lot.

The world

 

is full of doors.

And you, whom I cannot save,

 

you may open a door

 

and enter a meadow, or a eulogy.

And if the latter, you will be

 

mourned, then buried

in rhetoric. 

 

There will be

monuments of legislation,

 

little flowers made

from red tape. 

What should we do? we’ll ask

again. The earth will close

 

like a door above you. 

What should we do?

 

And that click you hear?

That’s just our voices,

the deadbolt of discourse

sliding into place.