Droughts and Floods

By Jesse Hagopian

A bombshell drops
from under the brooding rain clouds:
twenty Seattle schools will be shuttered.

A funding drought.
Money trees withering.
Barren education,
amidst verdant corporations.

Desolate schoolyards surrounded by
the lush greenbacks of the Amazon jungle.

Parched, blistered lips of children,
while Starbucks’ cup runneth over.

Dry riverbeds (where funding once flowed),
amidst a monsoon of Microsoft profits.

Schools on cracked earth, cloven with dry scars—
while Boeing makes it rain in Seattle,
until the filthy gutters of mansions
overflow with cash.

Boeing also makes it rain in Gaza—
a downpour of GBU-39 bombs
sweeping away every university and hundreds of schools.

The Al-Sardi school in Nuseirat was one of them—
fourteen children’s voices washed away
in a deluge of avarice.

One young Palestinian survivor, Imad al-Maqadmeh,
asked cascading, soul-drenching questions:
“Why did they bomb us? Why?
I want to know why.
Why? We are all children in the school.”

There are those
who dread the unyielding torrent
of children’s daunting questions.
They damn up the resources
that once ran to Seattle classrooms;
creating cesspools of cash for missiles
whose explosions drown out the sound of youthful inquiry.

Always enough treasure
to flood the playground with blood.

Never enough
to water the garden of learning and love.

Children’s blood is heavier than gold;
it must be conserved,
like the last canteen
when crossing a sun-scorched land.

But if it is to be spilled,
let it irrigate the olive trees
under which students will study and dream—
let it nurture a global intifada
stretching from the Northwest to Nuseirat.