Dies Ire (We Interrupt Our Regular Program)

“Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” someonetweets, but few Twitter readers give reply. I was insecond grade, too young and innocent to know how this daybecame the day separating hope from now, the way acook who cracks the egg cuts yolk from clear mucosal white.My teachers didn’t tell me. My world retained simplicity ‘tilhome revealed that nothing would be simple any more.

In 1968, as I read Romeo and Juliet , Dr. Martin Luther Kingwent to Memphis. The evening news at supper showed thefootage–black and white--of fingers pointing to anotherbuilding window, another man slumped silent past a medicalreprieve. This balcony held lovers of a different sort, stilluniversal in their scope, as are all dreams whose dreamersdo not live to see their dreams complete. In June, my school

recessed. I woke in time for Captain Kangaroo. Instead, I sawunedited in color or in sound, fear moving face to face, andface to floor then loud in voices lacking nationalities. Fear andgrief are universal homonyms, vowels naked without consonantsto bind them. RFK, bloody on the floor, re-dies with eachnetwork news broadcast. This will not touch me here at home.I am too far removed for politics to make a point in death.

“Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” the anchor tweets,but few if any readers answer him. Who remembers Lennon shot,the Berlin Wall or Towers crumbling into dust? History barelygrazes cyber consciousness, yet children know the enemy at large,who sits at lunch and smiles their names, who goes to Sandy Hookand Columbine, and haunt with emailed threats on social walls: howwell they know the enemy so close, so unsuspectingly like them.