Dedicated to all those who are no longer
with us following the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas
High School shooting in Florida on February 14, 2018
 
In old Christian myths
women and children of
the Middle Ages
were entombed
as protection against
disasters of weather
or war:
virgins lost
to German lakes,
infants buried under
castle fortresses and bridges
to ward tsunamis
or armies...
But the songs
of the sacrificed
are never silent,
their wailing is the
wind over the ocean,
weeping
long after
each fortress crumbles.
 
This, Peter Wang knew
the moment he heard the blasts
of an AR-15 semi-automatic
approaching his classroom
at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High.
Among the screams,
he held the door for his classmates
and his teachers as if bound
to act with honor
by his Junior reserve uniform
of pressed grey-blue.
It was gold-pinned,
with black insignia stitched
into the shape of wings
along his shoulders--
the symbol of a hero, even as
fear must have crowded his veins.
No time to think, just
his blood rushing through him
like the wave of unbearable grief
in the heaving sobs of his mother,
begging to wake from
her nightmare:
Baby, hold my hand, she says,
Reach me,
the words rippling out of her limbs.
Print in a newspaper cannot capture
her pain as
Peter Wang’s casket
is carried away,
stars and stripes
blanketing the memory of him,
still in uniform,
buried with a Medal of Heroism,
and a Certificate of Appointment to West Point,
2025--
the year he would have graduated.
 
We share the same birthday, he and I,
except one of us
will smell the trees and grass on a college campus,
and one of us will remember
what’s been lost.
Our fates intertwined
yet never crossing,
except in the gentle March breeze
when I’m walking to school,
and to the whisper through half-open windows,
to the soft flap of curtains, to the silhouette
in the silence, I listen.​