Raza de Hanukkah 7

These are all our children
— President Obama, December 14, 2012

On the seventh night there was a halt in festivities
And the question:

What is it?
Took on a new sense:

Something terrible happened in our land
Something so broken.

We considered how we came to be this way
How we could become something else;

To find a way
Out of our breakage;

We are all implicated
It’s all of us and it’s everything;

We had to become willing to sit in our sadness
Resist the simple and the fragmented —

To find our silence
And mourn for those who lost.

jsg, usa