This will be a hard read based on the topic. The events from this week, and my life experiences as a neurodivergent woman, a former news writer, and losing a child inspired this poem called “When a Heart Breaks: The Ballad of Colorado.” I have decompressed, and listened and read opinions from the right and the left. I have worked on this poem over the course of two days.
When a Heart Breaks: The Ballad of Colorado
What would you hear when a heart breaks?
Is it the one tap and crack like the
way experienced hands tap and
break an egg? What type of sound
does it make? Cr-aack! Or the wave
crashing on the shore? Maybe it sits in
silence like the voice that yearns to
speak for those in pain and those
that bleed, but risks so much more if
a single syllable is echoed
with which others disagree?
You already know how a heart
breaks, and it shatters in silence—
the kind of silence some keep long after
children lie limp in a first grade room
before your daughter enters the world,
and nothing changes and more kids are
gone by the time she leaves the world,
butaren’t they just unfortunate
causalities based on what he said?
Hush now, you tell yourself,
and keep quiet because now is not the
time. You might have misunderstood.
Maybe you didn’t hear the whole
message. The flag’s at half-staff, but you
wonder if a single soul stops
to think on that day when a shooting
occurred in Colorado that, it was in the
same school district as Columbine?
The Columbine flower blooms in
May. Its light purple flowers appear
in the dappled light below the
Japanese Maple you had planted
one year after your daughter ascends.
You plant it for the teens who
flew from the earth on April 20, 1999.
Pour heartbreak in the soil and dirt because,
it seems, no one ‘round here—not really—
wants to hear your words.
you’ll just take his words
out of context, or so they say.
What do you really
understand, after all?
you don’t sing in a chorus line, and you forgot
the lines you were meant to rehearse in a world
of red. Perhaps you are bad at rehearsing,
or fatigued by performances night
after night. Too much of the New England
blood drips down your lineage, and
a California spirit in love with Carolina
mountains tries to grow between
the thorns and vines. It doesn’t mean you
don’t love those around you, and it
doesn’t mean you see yourself as more,
because ash to ash and dirt to dirt,
and why must we make ourselves hurt
by more children becoming ash to ash?
Maybe you dwell in darkness, they say.
You don’t think like the village people.
Maybe you are evil. Perhaps you are twisted
if you reveal your truest thoughts. Your words
are cut, crafted, and presented to the world
as the version of you they need.
But you guess you are the tree
with the blackened roots because
you remember the children gone too
soon. Every time a child goes,
and each time the tragedies are
pushed aside like when players take
chess pieces off the board at the
end of the game, you wonder what
went wrong and where—
or are you just the backwoods road
in need of repair?
But you guess it’s not about the
person, and what they hide under
the covers anymore. Or is still a game
of chess? Are we still in for the
win? Because, you say, “Sorry, friend”—
but your heart breaks again when you
think of the news the Catholic
school tells a parent their child’s …
You feel souls of children rather than
[ redacted; do not write here].
When you find the friends who
know pieces of you, your love runs
truly deep, but you understand
the sound of when a heart breaks—the
moment they say that your child has gone
away. The world goes quiet, and you
can’t see anything but your hands
when they stop the shake.
They don’t want your thoughts of the
other day. Not really. Because your heart
breaks for the children of whom thoughts
and prayers are uttered, and their parents’
lives shattered and another
school or public space will
inherit a memorial.
In these times. you wish you didn’t know
of what rose to power in 1933. You wish
that you did not possess your grandmother’s
spirit that refuses to bend to the world’s
expectations of a woman living in red.
She said, “I went to the book mobile and
learned of other nations and peoples,”
for her mind to escape Florida.
And you wish you never knew your
father’s true thoughts and council
because it might shock others to know
the Vietnam veteran believes much
the same as you. “Some people say ‘God
will use him like King David,’ and
I shake my head,” he says as you walk
together through the garden.
Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you’re blind
because it feels like it a lot of the time
even when you know fact from fiction, and
the fiction that’s becoming fact. Orwell,
Collins, and Atwood made sure we knew of
that. You wish Orwell was pretend again.
You write when you cannot speak because
you are accustomed to close scrutiny
of words from the time you were four,
and the doctor says, “She only repeats words.”
In another poem, you write, “… and your
daughter is never coming back down
that road again. Know your roads,
or you end up wondering
back to where only your mind,
but your body may never go.”
The words echo down the generations,
from the poem, “First they Came,”
The pastor wrote, “Then they came
for me and there was
no one left
to speak out for me.”
Maybe the words will only
echo without an answer.
And maybe the only words we
know how to say to each other
mimic: “I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
I wish you never quit your job and came along with me”
when Carl Sandburg wrote “Mag.”
This seems to be the language in which we speak.
What sound does a heart make the
the moment when it breaks? Does it sizzle
like bacon cooked in a pan
in an apartment
near the subway? Is it in the cry of the
puppy, when suddenly, it stops? Do you hear
it in the wind; the kind that people, who
grieve, believe they hear the voice
of their loved one–
their dear Annabel Lee? A child
laughs, and then bullets fly.
They were too good, and the world too dark.
They go to a “far green country, under a
swift sunrise” as Tolkien wrote. They–along
with your angel–are in a world of evergreen.
Evergreen High School, Colorado, September 10, 2025
Where do we go when the lights go out?
Annunciation Catholic School, Minnesota, August 27, 2025
No lights come on when lightning strikes,
Huguenot High School, Richmond, Virginia, June 6, 2023
(graduation ceremony)
and all businesses are closed until morning.
Covenant School, Nashville, Tennessee, March 27, 2023
(3 9-year-old children)
Where do you go when the lights go out, and
you just want to sleep because you have to
teach students in the morning?
Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, Texas, May 24, 2022
(21 souls)
Where do you go when the lights go out,
Oxford High School, Oxford Township, Michigan, November 21, 2021
and the paramedic tells you to pump your child’s chest?
Saugus High School, Santa Clarita, California, November 14, 2019
When they get her to the hospital,
i will love you long after the stars fade.
Noblesville West Middle School, Noblesville Indiana, May 25, 2018
but not long after the doctor explains they
“Mommy, i love you more … to the moon and back.”
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, Florida, February, 14, 2018
(18 souls)
can't revive your child …
Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newton Connecticut, December 14, 2012
(20 children ages 6-7)
Where do you go
“You are my sunshine,
my only sunshine …”
“Mommy, you’ll never leave me in the dark, will you?”
when the lights go out?
Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado, April 20, 1999
(13 souls)
Don’t leave.
Please stay with me.
Corrie's Season 