Education

 

Growing up, we had our own emergency drills,

shuffling to the halls and curling into little balls

with our hands over our heads against

some distant people we knew little about,

but it was a part of being in school,

like math and science and art, and recess;

and the President was shot, and I couldn’t

understand why my sister was crying

because I was only nine and “the President”

was foreign to me, some unknown person

in a city I’d never visited, couldn’t find on a map,

though I’d heard its name and his;

and Carol Savage moved away in the 2^nd grade,

love gone forever, save for my parents and a stuffed

elephant I’d been born with who would never leave me,

but I found love again in Junior High, or perhaps

what passed for love in Junior High, a new vocabulary,

only to finally figure it out much later, and the pain

that goes with it, and the loneliness of lost love

learned and new love found carried forward to adulthood,

wondering, always wondering, the whats and the whys of life

and love; and a war raged on, brought to us live

into our living rooms on a small black and white

screen showing the carnage and the protests

decrying the loss of life and liberties, freedoms

taken away, perhaps even lost forever in another land

on the other side of the world, a land

of rice paddies and names we couldn’t pronounce,

and what remained was sent home in a box

to be buried, a name etched on a wall,

so we joined the crowds and marched, sat in,

tuned out, and raised our signs, resisted, spent a night

in jail or a lifetime in Vietnam, changed,

chained even by memories that never go away,

even as we retire to our front porches, remembering

“the good old days,” and Carol Savage, love lost

in the second grade and the silly drills of school,

little human balls fearing what we didn’t know;

but now we know …;

and the knowing isn’t easier to understand,

easier to face unafraid, any easier than it was before

when we covered our heads or cried ourselves to sleep,

when things didn’t make sense but we rose up against them

or picked up a gun and lay down our lives,

all for naught, for what we learned was fear,

what we learned was to be afraid.