June 3, Pretty Boxes
Bouquets of flowers, bright balloons are blowing in the wind.
White crosses stand where children learned; their lives now at an end.
Two teachers, nineteen students were gunned down by Texas law.
Gun rights are valued more than lives: the Texan’s fatal flaw.
In brightly colored boxes, ten year olds are laid to rest,
To lie in earth forever, far too soon to be its guest.
Bright boxes, the last sight as parents grieve and say goodbye,
To mutilated children which the sod will overlie.
When kids are shot in school, where they’ve died many times before,
The Texas legislature sends more guns into the war,
They’ll turn schools into fortresses; but guns won’t be controlled,
(Nor profits of gun makers; who have spread around some gold.)
It isn’t all just bribery, though campaign funds buy votes,
For politicians listen when they’re shown some big bank notes.
Some also have beliefs: a holy right to own a gun.
They’ll tolerate some killing so that right won’t be undone.
Red States have shorter life spans and elect folks like Ted Cruz.
There’s more resistance to vaccines, more time spent in church pews.
Just correlation or causation? Minds remain unchanged.
The power brokers in control seem more and more deranged.
When guns are valued more than lives, a debt we can’t repay…
Some forty thousand lives each year, mounts higher, day by day.
Since power, like Mao said, comes from the barrel of a gun, (1)
Does that imply…instead of voting, we should all buy one?
The Senate and the Red States bow down to the NRA.
As long as this goes on we’ll pay a hundred lives a day.
More kids in pretty boxes, too disfigured to be seen,
When guns are valued more than lives, results are this obscene.
(1) See “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung,” by Mao Tse-tung and Hou Bo, also known as “The Little Red Book,” first published in 1964. Mao was the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from 1949-1976. The quotation more accurately reads, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”