I can’t take it. Not one more senseless act of violence, not one more. Somali-British poet Warsan Shire is right. Where does it hurt? Everywhere.
Guns by the dozens, by the hundreds, by the hundreds of thousands, stashed under the bed deep in the war chest in the secret bunker on busy neighborhood streets. Poor education and cockeyed logic and veiled racism and bullheaded imperialism and my rights are God’s and God-mandated rights at homes and homelands the world over. God bless America and my family and all that is me, myself, and mine. Prayers, pointed fingers, skyward eyes. Prideful, chest-beating ignorance in place of facts and figures and big beating hearts. Sovereignty and thousands of years of history of what’s done can’t be undone and wars that won’t end. Poverty and not enough food and not enough clean water and not enough caring about what happens outside my family’s four walls, so long as we’re fine, all’s well, big thumbs up for me and mine. Children withering, without opportunity, women dying for want of an education, oil the only water flowing under arid biblical land. Communal connection turned it must be a higher calling turned wild-eyed I’ll do whatever it takes. Murder. Martyrdom. Terrorism.
Or I just had a helluva day. So bad. So low. So I’m going to do something, anything, because I can and because I don’t know what else to do.
I can’t believe it,
I can’t bear to read the day’s news,
I can’t take it. Not one more senseless act of violence, not one more and one more and one more.
Somali-British poet Warsan Shire gets it right.
Where does it hurt? Everywhere.
“Later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?
it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere”
Warsan Shire
