Trigger Warning: An All Too Familiar Story
Simon’s Rock College of Bard, December 12, 1992

The blood of childbirth
is clotted, collected
in large plastic bags
labeled biohazard.
They are gathered
each evening, taken
to the incinerator
and burned.
The blood of childbirth
is never more
than a day old;
it has its own
crematorium.

The earth receives
the blood of Gaza willingly,
watering the sliding sands,
the hard pack dust
of a Portadown schoolyard
where one indivisible
God is rent, left
for tinkers, wanderers.

My son’s blood
seeped and flowed
through crude channels
dug by the copper
jacketed slug.
He watched his
blood, it dripped
in small puddles
as he climbed
for cover, trailing
his innocence
pooled in his jeans
mottled ocher,
burnt umber, cut
from his body
by the surgeon’s scissors.

Days later,
while he lay
curled in the car
Demerol dreaming
I walked around
the yellow tape,
retraced
his faltering steps.
I washed
the dried, flaking blood
from the staircase,
with a cascade
of tears, flowing
down to the shrubs
standing frozen sentinel
outside the dormitory.

He wears long jeans,
hiding legs laced
with jagged scars.
He absentmindedly
rubs them, as if
to erase
the unbridled anger
of his fellow student,
to hold back the blood
of the two who died.
He says his left leg
twitches each time
he drives through
Walpole, the wire
and walls of the prison
anchoring the horizon.

The State offered
the jeans he wore
that night, he kept
only the evidence tag.
The State burned
the jeans with other
discarded evidence,
their embers floated gently
over Boston harbor.

He denied the earth
the blood
of childhood’s death,
offering instead
its ashes.

First Published in The MacGuffin, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2025

And if anyone would like a copy of my new book, Free of the Shadow it is available here.