People, lately,
have developed a bad habit
of walking into churches
to kill other people,

which (I suppose)
is the natural evolution
of several thousand years
of people walking out of churches

to kill other people. Of course
it’s a bad thing so
no wringing of hands
is strictly necessary, although

(as is true of the killing)
we’ll do it anyway, even though
we get into that “us vs. them” thing
when we do, with our sad fingers

pointing outward while our trigger fingers
itch in sympathy, if not (at least to our hopeful minds)
solidarity. You have to wonder (or at least
I do) if the problem is really in the churches

or in us when people (not all people, of course,
it’s never “all people” when we talk of this)
put so much faith in the ability of
the God of the gun to bring peace

that the God of the hymns is relegated to
providing the soundtrack to the crusade.
For instance, in one of those violated churches
they have a song that goes,

“come down peace, come down peace,
let peace come down and surround us.”
On the news this morning a man, survivor of the killing,
wipes his eyes and says, “It’s gonna be hard

to sing that now,” and of course it’s always hard
(I know, I know how hard it is myself, for I have wanted
more times than I should count to bring my own pain
upon those who bring me pain)

to sing that, to wish for Something
to come down and bring a blanket to smother
our fire as it consumes us, but it’s harder now to sing it
as people (not our people, we know

it’s never our people) are reloading, adding fuel
to pyres, blaming people (other people,
not our people, it’s always other people)
for bringing the fire upon themselves

in the first place because God (our God,
or perhaps some other God, we can never quite
put our fingers on that God) isn’t in the church
where the fire came down in place of the desired peace.

When the fire came down this time people were singing,
“the sun will come out tomorrow, tomorrow…”
and maybe it will, we hope it will; a sun
to cover all of us (all people, all people

who walk beneath that sun) in something that
resembles peace. Until it does we’ve got
just three things to remind us of what we claim to want:
we’ve got churches, we’ve got people,

we’ve got a God who may not live in any church
if the death toll that comes from churches is any
indication, although I’m sure God stops in there
from time to time just as we do;

a God who sometimes appears deaf and blind, who
may not know much of peace at all (if we are the measure
of peace), who holds the blanket high above us
(perhaps to block the sight of all this)

and waits for us to call for it before letting it fall.
We are so hoarse from shouting at people
(other people, all the other people) who seem to feel
that the road through death is the only path we truly share

that when we sing (why must we sing
so hard? why is it so hard for us to just sing?)
we don’t believe it’s singing (but it is). Let peace
come down and surround us. Tomorrow. Tomorrow (if not today).