The Age of Unreason
On January 17, 1989, a young white man entered the schoolyard of Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, with a semiautomatic rifle. He shot and killed five children and wounded thirty-two others. The victims, as well as many of the wounded, were the children of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees.
when I was a small child
I did dream of murder
a girl named V—
who made friends effortlessly
wore purple
and was not unkind to me not once
I have never told this to anyone
must I identify her race
or only mine I was small then
as small as those five children
killed in 1989
in Stockton CA
by an ordinary man
who thought of the shooting
as an expiation
for the loss in Vietnam
for the loss of esteem
for white men for reasons
that have nothing to do with hate
claims the scholar
standing before us in the lecture hall
it is not personal in fact there is no feeling
I write it down not personal no feeling
and try to formulate an intelligent question
except I hate
that I’ve never heard this history before
and hate that an ordinary man
will somehow find war in anything
and call it valor
call it sacrifice five black-eyed children
look back at us from the scholar’s slide
death lighting their faces eternal
they look like me or worse
like my children
who are playing elsewhere
in another schoolyard
all our names missing from the pages of history
after interviewing the survivors
the scholar paused his research for ten years
waiting or unable to bear it or the first
draft was a blank page a silence in the lecture hall
saturated in time
silence
outraged by the problem of diction what word
might begin what word could
how do we ask history a question
is not the question I want to ask
and yet I write it down I remember
about Vietnam my civics teacher said we won
I remember as children
I did not want to play war
but my brother did in the woods behind our house
where we found an abandoned shed
the sunken roof revealing a slice of sky
bedsheet soaked in rainwater
no kerosene two old-time lamps
overturned on the floor
where fungus spawned a kind
of lawn the mossy walls
the perpetual damp
we had crept in through a window
my sleeve catching on a shard of glass
that once formed a perfect pane he pointed
to the enemy perched in a silver maple just outside
and my hands became a pistol
aiming at dusk-laced leaves I am remembering this
in the lecture hall
as I weigh the difference between ruin
and play
even as children
we knew the truth
though knew it only lyrically
that some wanted us dead
that marked by difference
we became to some
trespassers usurpers an alien pestilence
our very game
plundered nothing ours
it is happening
a voice urges another hero into battle
and who’s to say it isn’t there
the voice the hero or the battle
I cannot see it
but I feel it
the scholar explains
it happens every day
and lists the children’s names
as if into the majestic field
of a winter schoolyard
they will now march sons and daughters of war
we were never the enemy
we never lost the war
by dinnertime we were home again
anthems whirling in our heads
knowledge we did not want
we did not ask who lived here
or why they left or how we knew
such emptiness could be ours
what was it that St. Augustine said the children
need a metaphysics
we cannot have one
Source: Poetry (July/August 2023)