Eight Days after the School Shooting

It's called mortality salience.
I know, I study this stuff.
It's anxiety tightening around my eyes
as I see campus for the first time since,
looking into eyes bloodshot in exhausted faces,
tears at their corners,
bodies bleeding in our fretful sleep.

I scan the paper and see we are yesterday's news,
reminder that students shot dead in classrooms are everyday sights.

Mortality salience.
I scan the landscape for last week's memorial flowers on the schoolhouse steps
but the steps are bare.
The ghostly memory of last week's lit white candles lingers;
the classroom building itself,  a visual monument to death.

Everywhere I look, a reminder.
These eyes remember what they didn't see.

Mortality salience.
The picture in the back of my eyeballs haunts me.

Unexpectedly traveling too close to the edge,
and looking down.

© Christine S. Davis, 2019




Comments

Post a Comment

Your comments and feedback are welcome. Please be sure to be respectful.

Popular posts from this blog

Nana te Amo

Originally Posted: Monday, May 29, 2017Nana te Amo

Images of babies. Soft skin, sleepy eyes, smells of powder and poop, sweet earthy smells, chubby cheeks, perfect lips, and tiny tiny fingers and toes. A soft head of dark hair against Carmel skin and deep blue gray eyes. Your weight against my chest as you breathe heavily, deeply, and twitch in your dreams of heaven and earth, secure in your soul's memories, trusting in the life into which you have been placed. I hold you in my arms, my grandson, and give you promises of love, safety, hope, joy, health. Knowing I can guarantee none of these. Te amo, mi Jonah.


© Christine Salkin Davis, 2017
Read more

Creation's Signs (Sonnet)

Ice beads on tree branches, lacy limbs, white
fog sky. Silent cold of solstice, frozen
buds and waiting, wanting more. Trust the fight
for spring will win; life is always chosen
by the curtain drop. Germinating, tight
encased in fallow ground; warmth will blow in
when it's day. Hazy sky will turn to bright.
Seasons shift from snow to green and flow in
new anticipated patterns, cycles.
Young to old and seed to flower, winter's
sleep to summer's fruit, living, miracle
of death, deeper love from friendship's center.
Good needs time to grow and patience, plot lines'
tensions, resolutions. Creation's signs.

© Christine Salkin Davis, 2019


Read more

Narrative Inheritance (Pantoum)

(Written with Spoma Jovanovich, UNC-Greensboro; Abby Lackey, Jackson State Community College; Cara Mackie, Florida Southern College, in Montgomery, AL on 4/6/2019)

(Upon reflecting on Montgomery, Alabama's National Memorial for Peace and Justice)

"Is this like a maze?" "Yes, precious one, it is."
Lives mattered then, and they matter now.
Burdened, silenced, burdened, heavy; I want to beg for mercy.
Blood, tears. Water.

Lives mattered then, and they matter now.
Standing in the midst of ghostly witnesses to hate, hanging, there is no peace.
Blood, tears. Water.
Dignity.

Standing in the midst of ghostly witnesses to hate, hanging, there is no peace.
The wall is crying shades of brown. Dignity. A narrative inheritance I cannot escape.
The wall is crying shades of brown. Burdened, silenced, burdened, heavy; I want to beg for mercy. A narrative inheritance I cannot escape. "Is this like a maze?" "Yes, precious one, it is."

Read more