It's National Poetry Month. Here’s an old one that would definitely be included in my Selected. The times, and all of the media coverage, affect us internally, until one day you find yourself responding to something in a way that completely surprises you, and you say to yourself, “Where on Earth did that come from?”

Elegy for the United States of America

for Jacqueline & Zachary-Michael

I pulled up & dropped you off, waved & drove away,

late for work, the schoolyard empty, no group of friends for you

to join, & turned around in a driveway less than a hundred yards

later realizing that I hadn’t seen you enter the building, hadn’t seen

you entering the safety of the hallways, couldn’t see you

entering the haven of a school, my hand already covering

my mouth, eyes moist, the imaginary man emerging from the bushes,

from the tree line, sprinting across an empty schoolyard in my

mind, heading for you like a bullet as I turned in the driveway, you

trudging toward the building with your backpack, lunchbox, violin,

all ten years, me knowing as I backed out of the driveway,

the tears wetting my fingers covering my mouth, that this

was completely irrational behavior, a ridiculous leap, a hole

blown wide in logic, that the man could

just as easily have been a woman, some woman crouching in

the bushes for hours waiting to drown my beautiful daughter

in a bathtub with her lime green hat, purple coat, backpack,

lunchbox, violin, all ten years

but what I saw when I turned was a man,

a man, sprinting across the empty schoolyard because I hadn’t

seen her enter the building, hadn’t watched her into

the building, the omission all the more painful because

we’d been talking about the war, about the suicide

bombers, & I thought to myself, naively perhaps, It is

crazy that I have to explain to my ten-year-old

daughter what a suicide bomber is, that I have to provide her

with a definition for suicide bomber to stow within her

backpack of words & ideas, & I realized as I

passed by the schoolyard too late to see her enter the

safety of the building that I had no idea who was in that building,

who was hiding in that building, who was planning things

in that building, that in some small yet deadly way headlines

are like hand grenades, that it was crazy that priests fondled young

boys, that a woman who wanted a baby drove across the state

& cut one out of another woman’s stomach, that young men

& women were blowing themselves up in cars rigged with

bombs, & I told myself as I cried & turned around & drove

back past the school that this was crazy, that everyone was mad,

that the whole world was raving & that I had to accept this because if I

didn’t then I couldn’t explain why I was driving past the school,

why I was seething with irrational fear, why in the hitch of an instant, between

the flash & boom of a detonated bomb, I saw in my mind

the man sprinting across a schoolyard, saw it with my own eyes, as plain as

anything, saw him sprint across the path of my van, saw him

running down the street, saw him emerge from the bushes, saw him sprinting

across the schoolyard with my eyes which immediately started

to blur, & I wasn’t sure if I was all shook up from the thought of this man

attacking my daughter, from the thought of this sick phantom attacking my

daughter, from the thought of men & women so angry & disturbed

they destroy their own children, from the thought of limbs

& lives being torn by bombs like business as usual

& of course the schoolyard was empty, & I cried off & on all the way

to work, angry that I hadn’t stopped, that I hadn’t satisfied my crazy

impulse, & turning off the van I sighed & took off my glasses &

wiped my face & thought, So be it, you are crazy, & I went

in to work & called the school & asked the secretary to let me

speak with my daughter & was transferred to a phone in her

classroom & explained to the teacher that I was Jacqueline’s father—

& I could tell by the tone in the teacher’s voice that she thought

that this was odd, a little unordinary, but she quickly acquiesced.

And when my daughter said hello, I said, Hi, are you okay,

& she said, Yes, & I could tell by the question in her voice

that she, too, wondered, that she would quiz me after school,

if she remembered, then quickly turned around & told her

that I would talk to her later, that I was just checking:

& somehow I manage to resist

the impulse to ask if she, my

country, is sure.