The poet Tricia Knoll begins

Uvalde

Some little towns have titles.
This one: Honey Capital of the World
for sweetness bees pull from a flowering cactus. 

She continues to a title no one could have foreseen for that tiny Texas town. Except . . . that perhaps we could have foreseen it if we had reacted even more strongly to what happened in Buffalo only a week before, when shoppers at Tops Grocery were gunned down by another angry young man with an AR-15. Or if we had risen up and acted on our outrage. 

That’s what I’m asking you to do now, to act on your outrage for those 19 children and two teachers who were murdered in Uvalde. Act, share this petition widely so that we can bowl over our legislators instead of continually being bowled over ourselves by massacre after massacre. We need 298 more signatures to reach our next marker. And, yes, more after that, but let’s continue one marker at a time until we reach that number that will let them know we are serious, we mean business. 

Some of you know I am a poet and a fiction writer. Ive tried but can’t get out the words to match my grief. So I have some inkling what it took for Tricia Knoll to write those words. Read the rest of her  poem here (linked with her permission): 

https://www.verse-virtual.org/2022/June/knoll-tricia-2022-june.html