Poem: 'There is Nothing but Life here' by Sean Felix

In remembrance of the school shooting at the Edmund Burke School on April 22, 2022

Crack

A hard rain falls,
turning sunlight
into a prismatic shower.
As time loses its axis,
every step
is imbued with history,
every hole in the glass
becomes a galaxy,
every widened pupil
a black hole—
echoing:

I’m scared.
I’m scared.
I’m scared.

And I call back:

Come to me.
Come to me.
Come to me.
I will protect you.

For the first time
in a long time
life—that ever-elusive concept
is real,
because you are real.
The child is real.

Every moment we are together
is all of human history.
Every step
we take together
along the floor,
out the door,
and into secluded darkness
with others seeking shelter
from the terrible storm.

What we share
n this dark moment
is the clarity of tragedy.
We are young.
We are old.
We are storytellers.
We are builders and shapers of reality.
We are beautiful.
And we are terribly fragile.
When we endure together,
we share the fear and the pain
and make this bearable,
because we—
we
are!

And damn it
if this doesn’t hurt.
I’ve greeted the morning with tears,
and at night, in my dreams,
bullets pierce the sky
and children are stolen away.

But I dare not lose this time,
because this is how it all changes.
We can’t push this away,
bury it in the dust of statistics,
or the narrative of mental illness,
and rising crime or gun violence.
This is not a culture war.
This is a war on humanity,
and the lines are clear—
The craven, the greedy, and the weak
are on the side of death!
The strong, the generous, and the brave
are on the side of life,

and there is nothing but life here!

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SEAN FELIX is a poet from Maryland. He is the author of Did You Even Know I Was Here? which he published in 2020. Sean is also a talented visual artist and an educator with a fondness for Haiku. He lives in Maryland with his wife and children. Find his work here.