Wednesday
This past Sunday I shared a number of poems from Lucille Clifton’s Book of Days to reflect on how Christian nationalists, many of them wielding weapons of war, work against Jesus’s goal to bring the kingdom of God to Earth. One poem from the collection particularly stands out in the wake of the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde.
In “armageddon,” God foresees men coming, “full armed,” into our lives, and of us all dying as a result. When Clifton mentions “ruby hearts still bleeding through in places,” I think of those Uvalde children who, reports tell us, were bleeding out, even as “good men with guns” dithered in the school hallway.
In an ironic conclusion, Clifton says that enemies who shoot each other will “lie here together then, intimate and quiet as lovers.” In Uvalde, the killer, shot himself, lay alongside his victims.
Our own ruby hearts, our most precious resource because they represent our capacity to love and care for others, are also at risk of bleeding dry from our repeated exposure to gun trauma. “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart,” W.B. Yeats writes in “Easter, 1916,” and Clifton uses the image of the bleeding heart to remind us that we can still feel and love and grieve.
We need the reminding because so many bodies littering this valley floor threaten to fry our circuits, overwhelming our ability to empathize. The day we completely shut down is the day when Armageddon will in fact have arrived. Here’s the poem:
armageddon
By Lucille Clifton
i am all that will be
left to them in that day.
men will come here, full armed,
to make their last war.
their bodies will
litter this valley floor.
they will lie here together then,
intimate and quiet as lovers,
their ruby hearts still bleeding through in places.