This is called "What Good Does It Do You?"
And as I was trying to figure out what to read tonight,
I got a recorded message from my daughter's school
saying that because--
she's in grade school, but the high school had a lockdown.
And I've gotten-- it's not the first time I've
gotten this message where there's a lockdown,
because there was a lockdown, her school had a lockout.
No one could go in and no one could go out.
And any of you who have school age children
know they do these practice drills for lockdowns regularly.
And so I was thinking about that when I wrote this poem.
And because this happened today, I thought I'd read it.
I've also been thinking--
I was also thinking when I was writing
this poem about the separation of families of asylum seekers
who come to this country.
So I thought I would read this.
"What Good Does It Do You?"
No corner more conspicuous than the one children are
asked to huddle in for their own protection,
it's a drill for when the bad men come looking for them,
your daughter explains.
Already she's identified who's most likely to ruin it
for everyone by cracking a joke or crying
and the virtue of compliance.
I'm very still, Mama, very quiet.
Taught at a young age to side with the person who'd
keep her alive, your mother pressed herself
against the fence of the enemy encampment
and asked a soldier for bread.
She was six, seven.
The soldier slipped it through.
And so she returned every day.
And when he'd see her coming down the road, he'd say,
here comes my girlfriend.
Hunger's courting of pity, pity's dalliance.
Maybe there was no fence, no clear division,
as so often happens in civil war and in this retelling.
Your daughter brings home a book of poems and pictures
her class put together.
In it there is part heroism, part ache and rhyme
and relations.
No fire and ice, but lockdown and immigration.
Before fighter planes were deployed
to eclipse the sun of every child's drawing,
your mother as a girl dreamed them dropping bombs
on her house.
It's not that her mother didn't believe her.
It's that the ground was too hard, the basket too heavy,
the husband so far away.
Your mother never forgot the dream
that once she was an oracle.
But what good did it do her when grownups went on with business
as usual?