Christmas Mourning

Christmas is everywhere here.

Christmas is nowhere here.

The town Christmas tree

sparkling with light,

standing stoic,

standing beautiful;

facing a cemetery

dotted with new graves.

Keeping traditions from the past.

Needing Christmas more than ever.

Making sure Christmas lives on here

We want the town of Newtown

to remember this Christmas

for the thousand acts of kindness,

not for the singular act of madness.

© 2012 Catherine Giordano

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Christmas this year is tinged with sadness as the nation mourns for Newtown.  Your brave determination to carry on traditions despite your personal grief is a tribute to the human spirit. 

This picture of the Newtown Christmas tree is from USAtoday.

Consoling Families, Town, Nation

We bear a responsibility for every child.

Our first task is caring for our children.

If we don’t get that right,

we don’t get anything right.

Newton,

We have wept with you.

Newtown,

You are not alone.

This is from the speech Obama gave at the Newtown memorial Service on Sunday night.  There’s nothing more I can say, except bring back the ban on assault rifles.

© 2012 Catherine Giordano

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This picture of Newtown angels is from http://timesofnews.co/

A Teary Obama

Click Here to Look Inside

We've endured too many

of these tragedies

in the past few years.

Each time I react not as a president,

but as anybody else would—

as a parent.

And that was especially true today.

I know there's not a parent in America

who doesn't feel the same overwhelming grief.

The majority of those who died

were children—

beautiful, little kids.

They had their entire lives ahead of them —

birthdays, graduations,

weddings, kids of their own.

Among the fallen were teachers,

men and women who devoted their lives

to helping our children fulfill their dreams."

So our hearts are broken today

for the parents and grandparents,

for the sisters and brothers

for the families of those who were lost."

Our hearts are broken today

for the parents of the survivors,

blessed as they are

to have their children home tonight.

They know that their children's innocence

has been torn away from them too early

and there are no words

that will ease their pain."

As a country,

we have been through this too many times.

an elementary school in Newtown,

a shopping mall in Oregon,

a temple in Wisconsin,

a movie theater in Aurora,

r a street corner in Chicago.

These neighborhoods

are our neighborhoods;

these children are our children.

We’ll hug our children a little tighter,

we'll tell them that we love them,

we'll remind each other how deeply

we love one another.

May God bless

the memory of the victims

and heal the brokenhearted

and bind up their wounds.

I took the text of Obama’s speech to the nation about the massacre in Connecticut and condensed it a little and inserted line breaks to achieve this poem. It was a very poetic and beautiful speech.

My thoughts kept returning to two things.  In the Orlando Sentinel yesterday, printed before the shooting happened, the paper printed a tweet from Andy Borowitz: “Maybe I’m a dreamer, but I wish mental health care was as easy to get as say, a gun.”

The other thought was about the Christmas presents the families of these slain children probably had hidden in their closets, all wrapped and ready for Christmas morning, the parents imagining the joy on their children’s faces when they opened these presents, these presents that these children will now never receive.

© 2012 Catherine Giordano

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The picture of President Obama speaking to the nation
 about the Connecticut shooting is from
http://bigstory.ap.org