Who Tries To Stop This
response to murder of LK, July 2011

Severe thunderstorms were predicted, but they didn’t come.
I wanted agitated weather, tumult in the universe, to manifest what I felt inside.

He says “That’s why the wife and I don’t read the newspapers anymore”.

On this hot muggy night like I’m back there in Brooklyn. 
Skullcaps flapping, fringes peeking, ruddy cheek boys play wild
in yeshiva schoolyards.

An eight-year-old in Boro Park asked the wrong man for directions. He was murdered
dismembered.     

Some hear about war, feel outraged, moved to action.

Kids are raped by fathers, teachers, priests.  And brutalities from my own childlife.
Still being committed, all these years later.

Who tries to stop this?

“I don’t listen to poems about trauma”, she says, “That kind of stuff
brings me down”.

But I won’t shut up. I will speak it and write it. I’ll be in your face about crimes
against children.

You are anti-war, you claim. Good, so am I.

.

Micky Shorr, Bio: I am a school social worker/psychotherapist, recently retired after a long and meaningful career working with children and their families. I lived in the Hudson Valley, NY for several decades, where I facilitated a monthly poetry reading, had some of my work read on public radio, and was a featured reader at several local venues, as well as in the metropolitan area. I returned to Brooklyn a while ago, and am loving to see first hand my grandson becoming himself. My poetry has been published in a number of literary journals, and in the award winning anthology “A Slant of Life”.