4:27
4:27 a.m.
I’m awake
Don’t know
why, but I am
And I hear
the shots
They’re more
like pops, like cap guns so I know they’re not too close
They crack
off in rapid succession like Black Cats, firecrackers on the 4th of
July
But it’s not
the 4th of July
Or New
Year’s Eve for that matter
The guns pop
off on those nights too around here so I am not unfamiliar with the sound
I suppose
it’s ‘possible’ that these are firecrackers
If one wants
to be an optimist…
But they way
they pop off
Four or
five, then a pause
A string of
five or six right back
I know
they’re not
Anyone else
within earshot knows they’re not
Then it’s
quiet again
As quiet as
4:27 a.m. usually is
Maybe a lone
car going down the street,
Sometimes
the fire truck, siren off but all the strobes cutting the night
Brilliant
white and the danger of red
Or a train
rolling through to places unknown
As the
relative silence surrounds me again
I wonder how
we came to be like this
We gather in
parks, on streets and parking lots
We gather
with placards and shout into cameras and camera phones
“Black lives
matter!”
“Women’s
lives matter!”
“Police
lives matter!”
“ALL LIVES
MATTER!!!”
But this
isn’t the way we treat each other
This is NOT
the way we treat each other
No one wants
to see our young men dying
Not at the
hands of the police
Not in
foreign lands in wars where they may or may not even understand “why” we are
there
With guns
drawn and trying to force our beliefs and ideas on people who don’t want them
Not at the
hands of other angry young people who have come to believe in a warped sense of
justice
Wear the
wrong color and get punched
Punch me, I
stab you
Stab me, I
shoot you,
Eye for an
eye, body for a body
And they’re
still counting bodies every night on the news
All the
things Marvin Gaye sang about on “What’s Going On”
No one wants
to see the innocent hurt and killed
Men, women,
children
Walking home
from the store, driving home from the soccer game, playing in the front yard
Minding
their own business and living their own life
But somehow
those places become right place at the wrong time
Catching
bullets meant for others
Or people
running from police crashing stolen cars through yards and over sidewalks
And down
roads headed the wrong way
No mother
wants to think their child is capable of these things
“Not my
child. My child was a good person…”
I like to
think we would all like to believe that of each other
But here we
are
Back to the
Old West and frontier justice at the end of a gun
For the gun
has the final word
But guns
still don’t kill people
Any more
than knives, chainsaws, cars or baseball bats
The problem
is still with the people who use of these things for bad purposes
We’ve lost
respect for each other somewhere
De-humanized
each other
And until
that changes
It doesn’t
matter how many people march
It doesn’t
matter how many people chant the slogans
And carry
signs and all of that shit
It’s 4:27
a.m. on Meadowbrook
I think I’m
safe in within my walls
