On Learning That the U.S. Bombed a School in Iran

A poem for precedented times.

Is it any wonder, really, that the home of 
the brave bombed a school full of children? 
Are you actually surprised? You say you are 
shocked and horrified, your thoughts and 
prayers ribbon out in a hasty spill, how on
earth could we have done such a thing. Be
serious. When you stop and think of those
little girls, tiny and gangly and just beginning
to learn, are they really any different from
the children on your street? They were 
just born into a different family, a foreign
country, not like good American children,
lucky to be in the land of the free,
who can go to school and be anything 
they want to be until a twisted terrible person
comes into their classroom
and shoots them.

Rest your eyebrows. Relax your mouth. You
are not blindsided by this news. You have heard
it, over and again, in headlines that break
families and bullets that spell might and right.
The missiles of freedom will sprinkle childish
fury over a nation that, they say, confines girls 
in a box of sexist oppression, nothing like
the boxes we have here, for the remains
which we, at least, are able to find. 

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