to the parents of a fallen sparrow
Words cannot express the grief nor the sorrow
That fills my soul to learn of these twenty lives
Now lost forever, gone forever, to sleep forever
Accompanied now in death as in life by the souls
Of their six courageous protectors—brave souls!
And by the tears of their parents, by the prayers
Of countless millions of their fellow countrymen
Twenty born to die and not to live
No wise sage can ever tell us why
None shook us from our complacent sleep
Roused us from our refuge in fantasy’s deep
Destiny has taken from us the lives of these twenty souls
And from, whoever hitherto remained unscath’d,
Our innocence as well, strange truth!
Leaving our hearts to sob
And our minds to weep
From imponderable grief
Our naïve beliefs destroyed in a moment of utter madness!
Our nation shocked to the core of its essence:
“How could we ever have let it come to this?”
When now we see the havoc these acts reveal!
Beneath the sunless sky and moonless night
Twenty fatal streaks of lightning erupted in thunder
Twenty flaming arrows like shafts of darken’d light
Have torn these brave hearts and young souls asunder!
In a land of beauty and serenity
And purpose’d consecration
All the uncountable acts
Of violent intrusion and death
Could not prepare the nation
For this unholy desecration
That took from these sweet children
Their first and last most precious breath
The beauty of the rose,
The rainbow colors of forest and field
The gurgling brook,
The wide open spaces of field and sky
Cannot overcome the fatal harm
Now thrust most cruelly upon us
Where death mocks all that we build
Stops us from traveling backward in time
To the last afforded moment before destiny strikes
To confront the man and yell “You must yield!”
We cannot now know the why or wherefore
Such unsought heartache and tragic sorrow
Should come ashore to these precious lands
Worked and muscl’d into shape and destiny
By the fruits of labor of unknown callous’d hands
Where minds breathed free, where souls did soar
We can never speak to him
On the morning of that final day
He who knew not how twisted
And broken his mind had become
To urge him away from his darken’d path
Of gun and bullet, of death and revenge
To offer a hand of friendship and
Accompany him not to school—
No, never a school!—but to the police,
The home, the hospital, yes the hospital
To receive the doctor’s care he needed
But no one knew, too late, too late
We cannot get there in time to persuade
Him home again, to stay his mind
When first he decided to commit
The bloody unspeakable carnage
Senseless mayhem without purpose
Or hope of redemption
This ultimate act of murderous rampage
And heinous suicide
We cannot now assuage our most private fears
Or even tell ourselves why our children’s fate
Should end up in the hands of one such as he
Tempting us with the self-destroying need to hate
Rather must we, even through our tears,
Always treasure and celebrate
The goodness and purity
Of childhood love
The love that these children sweetly shared
Are the memories we swear to safeguard
In order to build a better world
It is their last wish, their precious gift to you
It is their love that triumphs!
