There’s 15 gone, the news reporter said,
and I intoned the numbers to my son:
12 students and a teacher stricken dead
and too the pair that brought the bomb and gun.
But he corrected me – my teenage sage –
that’s 14 students, Mom, asserted he.
A pair of pupils perpetrated rage
outrageous, horror and calamity.

We call the neighborhoods communities,
the bedroom suburbs everybody buys
in fact or dream, but those are fantasies
more terrible than Circe’s spells. Be wise
and wake, arise from sleep: the view to truth
resides in clear remembrances of youth.