Hearing of Uvalde while Visiting Vilnius

Alan Berecka

May 26, 2022

I saw a woman begin to weep

as she walked through the basement

cells beneath the KGB museum.

"Overwhelmed, just overwhelmed,"

she said, "By the inhumanity

of it all," overwhelmed in a foreign land,

overwhelmed forty years after the fact.

I do not tell her I come from Texas,

South Texas so near to Uvalde

where children at school, children

at school were gunned down.

I cannot explain how it is possible

for me to walk or even stand today,

cannot explain why I am not wearing

sackcloth and ashes, how could I explain

that I come from a country that loves guns

more than life, a land where even the worst

tragedies just leave us numb.

Alan Berecka earns a living as a reference librarian at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi. His poetry has appeared in many journals including The Concho River Review, The Windward Review, Ruminate, and The Christian Century. In 2017 he was named the first Poet Laureate of Corpus Christi.