-- for Emma Gonzalez and the other student activists
I see her on TV, screaming into a microphone.
Her head is shaved and she is beautiful
and seventeen, and her high school was just shot up,
she's had to walk by friends lying in their own blood,
her teacher bleeding out,
and she's my daughter, the one I never had,
and she's your daughter and everyone's daughter
and she's her own woman, in the fullness of her young fire,
calling bullshit on politicians who take money from the gun-makers.
Tears rain down her face but she doesn't stop shouting
she doesn't apologize she keeps calling them out,
all of them all of us
who didn't do enough to stop this thing.
And you can see the gray faces of those who have always held power
contort, utterly baffled
to face this new breed of young woman,
not silky, not compliant,
not caring if they call her a ten or a troll.
And she cries but she doesn't stop
yelling truth into the microphone,
though her voice is raw and shaking
and the Florida sun is molten brass.
I'm three thousand miles away, thinking how
Neruda said The blood of the children
ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.
Only now she is, they are
raising a fuss, shouting down the walls of Jericho,
and it's not that we road-weary elders
have been given the all-clear exactly,
but our shoulders do let down a little,
we breathe from a deeper place,
we say to each other,
Well, it looks like the baton
may be passing
to these next runners and they are
fleet as thought,
fiery as stars,
and we take another breath
and say to each other, The baton
has been passed, and we set off then
running hard behind them.
--Alison Luterman
I hope this poem finds its way to whoever can use it.
Alison