Saturday, August 17, 2019

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.


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