Dancing With Them I Brought

In the movies

bodies jerk when hit

with bullets

moving forward then back

machine-gun dancing

but in real life

you’re likely to hit the floor

when the shooting starts

prone

as bullets rip your body

lying atop your babies

to protect them

from a man who means

to destroy

no matter what

your babies

and you

#10 of 30 Poems in November to benefit the Center for New Americans. Today’s theme is DANCING.

A 30-year-old mother of four named Joann Ward is one of the dead in Sutherland Springs, Texas, along with two of her children. A story on yesterday’s NPR Morning Edition contained this from her father, quoting her oldest daughter Rhianna, nine years old, who survived:

“Mr. Lookingbill says the oldest daughter Rihanna, who escaped the church alive, has told the family how her mother pushed her down and ‘scooped up three of the babies and was laying on them when the shooter kept shooting through her to get all the babies.’"