by Robbin Williams

She’ll find it hard to be free
Of the presence of mind that was necessary
For her to be present now:
Smearing her skin with blood and lying still
So death would pass over.
Making her friend
An analogue for God’s only begotten
Offered, albeit unwittingly, on the altar of liberty
For what greater love hath no man,
Here where children are survivors
And peers are intercessors
Because decision-makers are silent.

Two families
Wed by desecration; gravestones turtledove.
Too little breadth between the numbers on the rocks.
Too little…
They’d become sweethearts,
Dearly departed buried betrothed,
Dearly beloved walk to the site from different
Sides of the grassed aisle. But they meet,
Unlike pompous pundit-feeders who grandstand.
Pictures tell me a sailor kissed a woman in the streets
On V-J Day; people married spontaneously
Because the war was over then, but now,
An off-duty officer on the air
Tells us to watch the rooftops in my city as
Two families in Texas throw rice in the cemetery.

But what of the flag?
Does it yet wave when there are
Classrooms where the bell rings
And no one moves?

*

No intervention after conception
But the right shall not be infringed, so after it’s born
A body can be barraged by any weapon formed.
Because after God created the world with the words “Let there be…”
Man asked “Am I my brother’s keeper?” creating society.

If a covenant’s sealed with blood, who is the shooter conscripted to
When earth swallows what falls from the ones
We were told to suffer to Yeshua?

*

If we cry because this happened to someone else’s children,
Maybe it will deliver our souls.
I’m embarrassed to tell my daughters that adults don’t know how to stop this,
That some of them think more shooters will prevent this;
That some grown-ups would rather believe gunmen are hypnotized
By psychopaths who want to subjugate citizens worldwide
Than acknowledge the fact that they themselves
Are scared to face life without weapons. They’d shoot me for writing this
And they don’t even realize their anger’s a cover for the fear they call freedom.
I might need to walk around with a gun after protesting
The fact that too many people are walking around with guns.
They would say the person who shot me was deranged, manipulated
By wicked men in high places so the villains could pass laws to take their weapons,
And that I worked for the same globalists, who killed me through another pawn.
They confuse their convolution with evidence of conspiracy.
They think their authority is threatened by the future.
They bluster into microphones about taking the country back when their ancestors
Never had it. The people who did rule, through class and enslavement,
Tricked their great-grandparents, selling them confidence in skin-color caste.
They chose the color name for themselves that supposedly represents purity
Here. It represents death in the East. The sun rises in the east.
They fear the new day and the death they named for themselves.

—

Robbin Williams lives just a couple blocks east of the Missouri/Kansas state line with his wife and their two daughters. He likes to make music out of disjointed phrases and accidental percussion and he spent the last year documenting graffiti and murals, including some generated by recent social movements. His debut volume of poetry, Juanita, will be published in 2023.