Lawrence Blake

The man who took us to the moon
grew up in a coal town, a black slash
of shacks and company stores astride
those creeping seams of flaking ore.
These towns have either flamed out 
like a torn mantle, or been born again 
as villages with pee-wee hockey teams
and schools that graduate future prime
ministers. In these rust belt towns small 
joys don’t corrode, such as Sunday mornings—  
when dad attends the rink to watch his child score.

One of these places sits tumbling
from the Rockies. Etched into the shale 
and slate between tall pine and endless
sky. Sap bleeds into noses well primed 
to take in the scent of log fire and wet soil.
The local, not a rag but a testament to how 
slow the news here is, announces the fossils 
dug up from the earth. A mom drives a truck 
in a glinting scar of ground, and the Raptors 
are named after some bones so hard they remain 
whole—not crushed—under ancient Pacific rock.

Now their news is fast, and this place tumbles
into our papers and across the screen of a phone.
That truck driver mother holding the still hand
of her hockey star daughter—one of those future
prime ministers, Olympians, writers or astronauts—
sits quietly, taking in the rhythm of the ICU. 
Wondering what happened? It had been such 
a normal day until those school doors opened 
and shots rang out, finding purchase in the young.

		              What happened?