At the Abyss

 

At the Abyss

Uvalde, Texas May 25, 2022

 

Nineteen children

barely adolescents

life evident in every step,

filled with

playful enthusiasm,

brimming with possibilities,

drinking in life through

every pour,

engaging every breath with

shimmering resolve,

the world the canvas

on which they painted

with vivid imagination and a

tapestry of color.

 

Suddenly and terribly negated

by the fiery discharge of a

cold metal gun,

bullets riddling through their young bodies

destroying hopes and idle dreams,

exhuberant ideas,

incipient joy and so many aspirations

terminated in an instant,

locked in the grip of absolute terror,

negating their future,

driving their families to the very edge

of corrosive despair,

turning off the light of existence

leaving a blackness steeped

in hollow silence.

 

Nineteen children

slaughtered by a young man

with madness in his brain,

delusional and beset by

the demons of explosive hatred and rage,

nameless passions unhinged and deadly.

 

The scope of this tragedy would not be

conceivable or even imagined

without weapons of such ferocity that

only a few moments intervened between

the living and the dead.

 

There is another madness present,

large, insidious and looming,

a madness resident within a social order

that formulated the idea that all

citizens have the right to be armed,

encouraged to be fearful and ever vigilant

prepared for violence and stoked with hate

for the sake of profit and greed,

for the sake of a

corrupt and deformed ideology.

 

A madness that pretends that

the corpses of children are

the price to be paid for a contrived

and ridiculous idea of freedom

devoid of any sanity,

empty of compassion,

dismissive of the common good.

 

A madness so cold that

it sees no need to

take such random and brutal

termination of young lives

to heart.

 

A madness infused with such stupidity

that it cannot see the

consequences of its own

barren and disastrous conclusions.

 

A madness that if unchecked

will bring only grief and

wreak havoc upon the future

for us all.