At
the Abyss
Uvalde,
Texas May 25, 2022
Nineteen children
barely adolescents
life evident in every step,
filled with
playful enthusiasm,
brimming with possibilities,
drinking in life through
every pour,
engaging every breath with
shimmering resolve,
the world the canvas
on which they painted
with vivid imagination and a
tapestry of color.
Suddenly and terribly negated
by the fiery discharge of a
cold metal gun,
bullets riddling through their young bodies
destroying hopes and idle dreams,
exhuberant ideas,
incipient joy and so many aspirations
terminated in an instant,
locked in the grip of absolute terror,
negating their future,
driving their families to the very edge
of corrosive despair,
turning off the light of existence
leaving a blackness steeped
in hollow silence.
Nineteen children
slaughtered by a young man
with madness in his brain,
delusional and beset by
the demons of explosive hatred and rage,
nameless passions unhinged and deadly.
The scope of this tragedy would not be
conceivable or even imagined
without weapons of such ferocity that
only a few moments intervened between
the living and the dead.
There is another madness present,
large, insidious and looming,
a madness resident within a social order
that formulated the idea that all
citizens have the right to be armed,
encouraged to be fearful and ever vigilant
prepared for violence and stoked with hate
for the sake of profit and greed,
for the sake of a
corrupt and deformed ideology.
A madness that pretends that
the corpses of children are
the price to be paid for a contrived
and ridiculous idea of freedom
devoid of any sanity,
empty of compassion,
dismissive of the common good.
A madness so cold that
it sees no need to
take such random and brutal
termination of young lives
to heart.
A madness infused with such stupidity
that it cannot see the
consequences of its own
barren and disastrous conclusions.
A madness that if unchecked
will bring only grief and
wreak havoc upon the future
for us all.
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