This poem is, in many ways, an elegy for a student of ours
at VCU, where I teach.
Thank you, Tony, for that wonderful introduction.
Title of it is "For the Honorable Wayne LaPierre,
President, National Rifle Association."
"Someone filed off the serial number of the Glock.
Someone bought it and sold it, and someone else sold it again.
And thus, Howard Reed Scott III, 17,
shot Tyler Binsted, 19, by the tennis courts
at Byrd Park, 1:00 AM on a rainy Thursday, a robbery gone afoul.
You were asleep in Beltway, Maryland then,
a gated community, security alarm enabled,
your own handgun loaded in a bedside table drawer.
Deeply, you slept, having all day
submitted to reporters' questions
after the high court overturned the DC handgun ban.
The Second Amendment once again preserved,
a victory not just for the NRA, but for
all freedom-loving Americans.
Deeply, you slept as Tyler Binsted bled out
against the tennis court fence, as Howard Reed Scott hurled
the Glock to the freeway roadside
from the window of his girlfriend's car.
You had read until you drifted off,
your wife beside you slumbering.
I do not know what book you closed, but assume it was not
Dante, who places the violent in Hell's Seventh Circle, Second
Ring.
Dante also was a politician, though an unsuccessful one,
dying poor and in exile.
I will not bore you with the partisan quarrels of Dante's
Florence, of Guelph against Ghilbelline,
of house arrest and banishment.
But I can tell you, Circle Seven is a river of blood
where Dante situates Alexander, Atilla,
and various tyrants, those whose violence to others
brings down cities and nations.
The river, furthermore, is boiling,
darkly crimson in the stygian reaches,
lit from afar by plains of fire.
The damned cannot rise above the singeing waters.
Pushed down into the bloody depths by the centaurs who
guard them, they cannot speak to bewail their condition.
I do not know you, sir.
Tyler Binsted and Howard Reed Scott
are surely unknown names to you.
And if they were known, would quickly be forgotten.
I cannot read Italian, and my art is limited and clumsy.
But Dante, I am convinced, would place you
in the depths of Phlegethon, his boiling crimson river.
He would make your pain unbearable.
Forever the seething blood would scorch and fill your lungs.
Dante Alighieri was a man of peace,
though famously self-righteous, aggressive, flawed.
Yet many and eloquent were his statements on freedom.
He believed some sins could be forgiven.
Regarding others, he was pitiless."
[APPLAUSE]