For MSD, in lieu of thoughts and prayers
This schoolhouse is marching.
This schoolhouse is not your father’s schoolhouse, nor your grandfather’s, nor yours.
This schoolhouse is your children’s, your grandchildren’s.
This schoolhouse is tired of blood & bullets & body bags & burying.
This schoolhouse is marching like no schoolhouse before it, not Kent State, Selma,
James Dean, Harvey Milk.
This schoolhouse is teaching old dogs new tricks.
This schoolhouse is reading & writing & ‘rithmeticking new texts: #NeverAgain; We Call BS.
This schoolhouse is erasing “In NRA We Trust” from the dollars, the politicians, the hobby-
lobbies of pseudo-patriots, the cash cows of AR-15s & TEC-9s.
This schoolhouse is marching for its life, our lives, your life, mine.
Suffer little children, the hell you say.
This schoolhouse is marching.
~ Robert Dean
Robert L. Dean, Jr.’s book, At the Lake With Heisenberg (Spartan Press), will be released in December of 2018. His work has appeared in Flint Hills Review, I-70 Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Shot Glass, Illya’s Honey, Red River Review, River City Poetry, Heartland!, and the Wichita Broadside Project. He was a quarter-finalist in the 2018 Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. He has been a professional musician and worked at The Dallas Morning News.
Guest Editor Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg is the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate and the author or editor of over 20 books. Founder of Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College, where she teaches, she also offers community writing workshops widely, and with Kelley Hunt, Brave Voice writing and singing retreats. She founded the 150 Kansas Poems site where she is thrilled to work with many fine guest editor poets and witness powerful writing from and about the heartland.
