Childhood Is Not

*content note: racial violence, gun violence, murder (details), grief, depression*

I.	Childhood is not meant to carry grief 
        taller than mountains never yet seen.
        It cannot carry, in its scrawny arms, 
        the upending agony of entire families after 
        their son, father, brother, uncle, cousin, lover 
        is murdered. Childhood cannot untangle 
        the unsensible ideologies of racism 
        that killed your Black cousin. 
        How does a nine-year-old wrap her head
        around a white man walking free
        after shooting a Black man, her cousin, 
        five out of seven times with a shot gun? 
        Childhood doesn’t teach you that a shot gun only has two rounds. 
        Childhood doesn’t teach you that the murderer reloaded. Again and again. 
        Childhood doesn’t tell you that the jury was all white. It doesn’t spare you 
        details of his death. Tell you that it wasn’t instant. That his mother, your aunt,
        heard him gurgle for his last breath at the court hearing. 
        Childhood is not void of active imagination. 

        Childhood does not know how 
        to pick up the pieces of a tragedy 
        so shattering. How to quell the monstrous
        anger of the surrounding adults. Childhood 
        does not know to stop them from reaching
        for bitter drinks intended to soothe the edges
        of such cutting loss. Childhood can’t know 
        that it actually makes the edges sharper. 
        Childhood does not understand 
        why the white side of the family
        isn’t at his funeral.