The Crossroads

I thought that, in light of the events of this past week, it was entirely appropriate to take a fresh look from a different perspective.  Poets.org disseminates a poem to an audience estimated at a quarter of a million readers on a weekly basis.

Poets.org has taken the unusual step of inviting venues everywhere to publish the poem for their own audiences.

@ the Crossroads - A Sudden American Poem

                                 RIP Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Dallas police
                       officers Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Michael J. Smith,
                       Brent Thompson, and Patrick Zamarripa—and all
                       their families. And to all those injured. 
                                               Let us celebrate the lives of all
As we reflect & pray & meditate on their brutal deaths
Let us celebrate those who marched at night who spoke of peace
& chanted Black Lives Matter
Let us celebrate the officers dressed in Blues ready to protect
Let us know the departed as we did not know them before—their faces,
Bodies, names—what they loved, their words, the stories they often spoke
Before we return to the usual business of our days, let us know their lives intimately
Let us take this moment & impossible as this may sound—let us find
The beauty in their lives in the midst of their sudden & never imagined vanishing
 
Let us consider the Dallas shooter—what made him
                                                            what happened in Afghanistan
                                                  what
                flames burned inside

(Who was that man in Baton Rouge with a red shirt selling CDs in the parking lot
Who was that man in Minnesota toppled on the car seat with a perforated arm
& a continent-shaped flood of blood on his white T who was
That man prone & gone by the night pillar of El Centro College in Dallas )
 
This could be the first step
          in the new evaluation of our society    This could be
                the first step of all of our lives
 - Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, July 8, 2016
Copyright © 2016 by Juan Felipe Herrera. All rights reserved. This poem is being shared by Poem-a-Day, a series from the Academy of American Poets that features new poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. For more please visit www.poets.org or email poem-a-day@poets.org.