#226: Orlando, Florida

In my classroom,
alone, my senior students
out already and a small,
manageable list of things to do
to wrap up the school year,
I’ve got more time than
I’m used to having
and I find myself often
thinking of you, Orlando,
and looking at photos
in an article, “Thousands
Attend Vigil to Prove
That Love Wins.”
Keeping busy might be
an antidote to thinking
and feeling, but I’m not
quite busy enough, so
today I think and feel.
Each photo I look at
chokes me up and I have
to look away to prevent
myself from sobbing.
I don’t know why I feel
it necessary to prevent
myself from sobbing
because if anything warrants it,
this does, and if anyone
walked into my room and saw me
the sobbing would be explicable.
A thought occurs:
through all of these horrific
tragedies, even after
Sandy Hook, I don’t remember
or am not aware of any
of my colleagues losing it
on the job. It’s almost a
kind of unwritten contract
that we agree to take care
of the children in our care
and are last in line in our own need–
or, again too busy to think or feel,
preparing 87 minutes of wall to wall
activity for 3 different classes and
having sometimes 200 kids
to somehow assess, we can’t afford
to slow down for grief or anything
like that. And no one would take
a bereavement day for strangers
on the other side of the continent.
I apologize for this, Orlando,
because in a perfect world,
or even one slightly more perfect
than the one we have, we would
all take bereavement days to grieve
for strangers, or, we would keep working,
finding some way to grieve together
because that would be the most
important work we could do:
grieve, stumbling somehow into hope
and compassion and love, and then
figuring out together how to prevent
and stop madmen from acquiring
automatic weapons in order to
murder more Americans.
It seems to me that this is
the kind of schooling, the kind
of education we need now–
and it’s not like we need to
learn how to do it, because
we already know. We have the
knowledge and we have the power;
we simply need the will. That is all we
need, Orlando, Florida, people
of the United States of America:
we need the collective will
and it is done.