Red, White, and Blue Stained Glass
(for Annunciation Catholic School, Minneapolis)
By Breckyn Forcey
This morning
The pews were filled with small shoulders,
Collars pressed flat,
Voices rising in hymns too fragile to shield them.
This morning
The light spilled through stained glass,
Painting halos on the faces of children
Who thought church was safety,
Who thought school was sanctuary,
Who thought adulthood was far away.
And then,
A rifle shattered the stained glass,
And the saints on the windows
Bled into the aisle.
America,
Your hands are already red.
Your hymnbook already hollowed out
To make room for another obituary.
Fletcher.
Harper.
Say their names with me.
Not as statistics,
Not as footnotes in tomorrow’s newspaper,
But as children.
Children whose laughter
Should never be rewritten
As gunfire.
Children who deserved recess,
And birthday candles,
And all the tiny, ordinary forevers
That were stolen.
Fletcher,
Harper,
Your names are chalk dust now,
Scrubbed against a blackboard that never asked
To become a gravestone.
They tell us
Locked doors saved countless lives.
But tell me,
Why must children be locked in
While freedom roams armed outside?
Why is safety
Always something we barricade,
Never something we build?
This is not faith.
This is not safety.
This is grief
wearing the mask of liberty,
Teaching us the Pledge in a language of sirens.
And I am so tired of elegies.
Of lowering my pen like a flag,
Half-mast, half-broken.
Tired of writing children into past tense.
How many times must we gather at
Candlelight vigils
Before the wax drips into our throats
And seals us silent?
How many “thoughts and prayers”
Until prayer itself feels weaponized,
Until thought is an alibi,
Until protest is an excuse?
America,
You tell me this is freedom.
But freedom shouldn’t fit in the chamber of a rifle.
Freedom shouldn’t echo through
Stained glass windows
As gunfire.
Freedom should not leave children
Bleeding on a church floor,
Their only sin,
Being alive.
Still,
I refuse despair.
Still,
We gather.
We write.
We testify.
We turn our throats into warning bells,
Our poems into barricades.
We sharpen grief into protest,
And protest into hope.
Because if society insists on eating its children,
We will not let it digest them in silence.
We will spit their names back out,
Louder than gunfire.
Fletcher.
Harper.
We will not let you disappear
Into headlines.
We will not let you be swallowed whole.
Your names are our anthem now.
Your laughter our resistance.
Your memory our march.
And America,
Hear this clearly.
We will not stop singing
Until stained glass stops shattering,
Until no child’s future
Is written in red.