Where Is the Love - Words to Heal Trauma

‘I don’t know what to say anymore’

In 2015, I was invited to a poetry performance at Tom Hayden’s house. My daughter was among the featured poets, and it was there she debuted her poem, Countdown to a School Shooting, written when she was 15 and performed with her team that would go on to win back-to-back national poetry slams.

It was there I learned about the Bertolt Brecht poem I often reference, written after World War II, when the world had gone dark and a generation was lost.

“Indeed I live in the dark ages... When to speak of trees is almost a crime...”

Hayden, a former state senator who was the director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center, read the Brecht poem to the audience who had gathered in his Brentwood home, and I could feel the clouds of 2016 gathering.

That my daughter, who went on to become the Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate and the West Coast Youth Poet Laureate, was writing poetry about mass shootings was not lost on me, and I changed my life accordingly. I returned to my social justice roots, and never looked back. I wanted my children to know their mom was paying attention. I think the work I have been doing for the past six years speaks to that.

A mother and daughter, who write to right.

My daughter’s poem in Teen Vogue, Reformed Sonnet, writes of an “adolescence eaten by looming clouds” and dreams of a “subtracted amendment.”

And yet, words that I type through trauma and tears over the latest mass shootings cannot sway the wind. I know this. I am usually made of some pretty tough stuff, but I am admittedly weak in this moment. My children and I were just in Monterey Park last week, enjoying hot pot and boba, and noting how its downtown district on Friday nights is the new Hollywood - vibrant, filled with bars, restaurants and nightclubs.

Then, I wake up to David Hogg’s tweet: “I don’t know what to say anymore.”

News of the mass shooting breaks in even my TV-less home, where newsp*rn is always on mute because I find the darkness in the world does not need compounding by horror videos on loop. Maybe it’s because I used to have to sit in dark edit bays determining what would be looped, and this is my atoning.

And while still processing the shooting in Monterey Park, I learn that the beach town of my youth - Half Moon Bay - where I spent my happiest moments under cloudy skies during summertime - was the site of another mass shooting. I don’t know what to say anymore.

David Hogg ☮️ @davidhogg111

I don’t know what to say anymore.

And so I walk among trees, to hear the birds and see the turtles and coyotes, and to get inspiration to find some words to make things better, to find the love, and to reiterate that what we are seeing is merely the passing of greed - of violent men who benefit and profit from a world of pain, where people live in fear. Machine men, with machine minds, and machine hearts.

That is not who we are. A mafia state has infected our land, they infected our NRA, and our intelligence agencies and politicians - but not all of them. They sell us their bullets, as we lose our way. But that is not who we are.

Empathy is what makes us beautiful. Kindness heals even the coldest heart. It is the duty of poets, activists, filmmakers, historians, and artists to continue fighting the war against empathy.

We have to start somewhere.

Countries that don’t have more guns than people do not have our problems. Start there.

You will find me among the trees, healing my trauma, trying to find the words.

(Photo credit: LaNita Jones, Caddo Lake Sunset, May 2022)

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