Broken Sestina for the al-Taba’een School
Broken Sestina for the al-Taba’een School and 16th Street Baptist Church
— On August 10, 2024, Israeli jet fighters dropped US-made GBU-39 250-pound bombs on al-Taba’een school after the call to prayer, making it the deadliest attack on a school shelter yet because so many gathered in one place to pray.
— On September 15, 1963, men from a splinter group of the Eastview Klavern #13 chapter of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church on Youth Sunday resulting in the deaths of four little girls and the injuries of many more.
Here’s what we’ve learned—there’s no liturgy
that turns a bomb into moon-flowers. No ritual
for prayers that become rubble and ash. I can’t school
anyone on religion. You worship
what you revere enough to gather
your time-money-mind in search of. (g)od
is an heirloom as much as fate. Made by war and history. God,
I have no words for what happens in Your name. A liturgy—
of horrors steeped in blood. My failed language gathers
on my tongue. The english I didn’t ask for. It’s broken ritual
bent towards mass-grave-lynch-bomb, constructing a prayer. Worship
as in one moment we called your name and the next we were gone. School
and church. Our wailing and chorus stretch across oceans. Schools
of fish say our names among coral reefs. They move together to avoid predators. God,
please let Your memory be older than sea. Where can we worship
safely? The al-Taba’een school. The 16th Street Baptist Church. The liturgies
only just began before the bombs made by us and the men made by us began their ritual.
Then, we gather.
I hate praying alone. I want to believe it’s safer, if my lover and I, the kin we’ve gathered
go to separate corners to sing to You. If we don’t send our children to school.
If we avoid the south-north-west-east of the land we were born on. If we keep our rituals
quiet. Avoid choir and song. Youth sunday. Avoid call to prayer. Scripture reading. God,
I hear You best with my sisters breathing next to me. I don’t want to avoid all liturgy
that might make our bent and begging traceable but it is predictable, our worship.
Our Easter sunday speeches, our prayers over dawn breaking the sun’s yolk. Worship
spills, making us a single sound, carried to where we’ll gather
in the next life. In the next life, the olive trees follow the liturgies
with us. In the next life, I’m sending even the anemones to safe schools.
Dear God, I come to you fearful and grieving. Dear God,
Please keep my people s—