Today's poem is by Bob Hicok

Endless
       

I'll not remember where I was when I learned
that nineteen kids and two teachers were shot
and killed in a Texas school. That I was on a futon
petting our cat whose eyes were removed this past winter.
That the early rounds of the French Open were underway.
That I had two oranges, a bowl of blueberries,
and two strawberries for dinner. That two inches
of rain fell that day. Why do we say rain falls,
by the way? If it has no chance to travel
in any other direction, is it really falling,
is it even an action or just existence, an aspect
of being? I won't remember looking at a tiny fawn
run/stumble twenty feet away from its mother,
run back to her, and run away again over and over,
testing the water of having legs, a new student
in the school of deer. In days to come we'll learn
about the shooter's search habits, grades, family;
some will want to ban or limit guns; some will want
everyone to carry; and the news, which only
has this one thought in mind tonight, hour after hour
on channel after channel of commentators and experts,
will forget the shooting over the coming week as well.
When I look at waves, each one seems so important,
to be everything that matters in the world
in that moment, then it goes away and a new wave
shushes the sand or screams at it. Before I forget,
I wanted to do some math. Twenty-one people killed
= forty-two (probably) living parents who'll always
remember what happened. And maybe one sibling
per person, so sixty-three. And maybe on average
three living grandparents, so one hundred and twenty-six.
Add two friends per person: one hundred and sixty-eight.
And I bet that's conservative and I bet that life
has very little that's new on a given day: I've seen
fawns frolic before, had oranges before,
and plenty of cats have had glaucoma,
and plenty of too-many people
have been shot to death in this country,
where we gun people down the way rain falls.
To say it's in our blood to spill blood
is the worst thing I've ever written and perhaps
the most true. But look at me asking you
to think about changing the future
by remembering the past, knowing that's not
what Americans do. We let these shootings
wash over us—ten killed ten days ago
in Buffalo and five not long before that
in Duluth, and so on, wave after wave,
and I've written this poem before, including noting
in other versions that I've written this poem before,
a level of self-consciousness that has to end
at some point, doesn't it? Or should I say,
see you next time?

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Copyright © 2023 Bob Hicok All rights reserved
from The Southern Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission