when I was a small child
I did dream of murder
a girl named V—

who made friends effortlessly
wore purple
and was not unkind to me        not once

I have never told this to anyone
must I identify her race
or only mine                I was small then

as small as those five children
killed in 1989
                         in Stockton CA

by an ordinary man
who thought of the shooting
as an expiation

for the loss in Vietnam
for the loss of esteem
for white men              for reasons

that have nothing to do with hate
                                                              claims the scholar
                                      standing before us in the lecture hall

it is not personal         in fact there is no feeling
I write it down            not personal no feeling
and try to formulate an intelligent question

except I hate
                         that I’ve never heard this history before

and hate that an ordinary man
will somehow find war in anything

and call it valor
call it sacrifice              five black-eyed children
look back at us from the scholar’s slide

death lighting their faces eternal
they look like me or worse
like my children

who are playing elsewhere
                                                 in another schoolyard
all our names missing from the pages of history

after interviewing the survivors
the scholar paused his research for ten years
waiting or unable to bear it or the first

draft was a blank page             a silence in the lecture hall
saturated in time
                                                                         silence

outraged by the problem of diction      what word
might begin                  what word could

                         how do we ask history a question
is not the question I want to ask
and yet I write it down                                                 I remember

about Vietnam         my civics teacher said we won
                                              I remember                 as children
                                                                      I did not want to play war

but my brother did                 in the woods behind our house
where we found an abandoned shed
the sunken roof revealing a slice of sky

bedsheet soaked in rainwater
no kerosene      two old-time lamps
overturned on the floor

where fungus spawned a kind
of lawn       the mossy walls
the perpetual damp

we had crept in through a window
my sleeve catching on a shard of glass
that once formed a perfect pane                      he pointed

to the enemy perched in a silver maple just outside
and my hands became a pistol
aiming at dusk-laced leaves      I am remembering this

in the lecture hall
as I weigh the difference between ruin
and play

                                      even as children
we knew the truth
though knew it only lyrically

that some wanted us dead
that marked by difference
we became to some

                                    trespassers usurpers an alien pestilence
our very game
                        plundered        nothing ours

it is happening
a voice urges another hero into battle
and who’s to say it isn’t there

the voice the hero or the battle
I cannot see it
                                     but I feel it

the scholar explains
it happens every day
and lists the children’s names

as if into the majestic field
of a winter schoolyard
they will now march     sons and daughters of war

we were never the enemy
we never lost the war
by dinnertime we were home again

anthems whirling in our heads
knowledge we did not want
            we did not ask who lived here

or why they left or how we knew
                                                  such emptiness could be ours

what was it that St. Augustine said                  the children
             need a metaphysics
                                                 we cannot have one

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