The Angel of Death Comes to the Playground

March 19, 2018

We are locked out of the playground
because this morning a man
so young he books like a boy
escaped from Denver Health and the boy
may or may not have murdered
another man yesterday so the boy
was wearing handcuffs and his legs
were bound in iron bars and
he was wearing an orange jumpsuit
so he should have been easy to find
yet no one could find him so
five blocks away my daughter’s school
is under lockout which means
no one can come inside
and though texts and phone calls
from the school assure us the children are safe
we worry and wait just outside the playground fence
and imagine the boy in the school with a gun
because at this very moment in another state
a boy is entering a school with a gun
and beginning to shoot and the children
are pushing file cabinets against doorways
and huddling in closets and though
we don’t know any of this yet I see her
on the swings, the angel, she is smiling at us
whispering something we can’t make out
and just before the bell rings making us all jump and
startling the angel away I hear
her silvery wings swishing in the breeze