For the community of Newtown, Connecticut,
                    where twenty students and six educators lost their
                    lives to a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary
                    School, December 14, 2012

Now the bells speak with their tongues of bronze.
Now the bells open their mouths of bronze to say:
Listen to the bells a world away. Listen to the bell in the ruins
of a city where children gathered copper shells like beach glass,
and the copper boiled in the foundry, and the bell born
in the foundry says: I was born of bullets, but now I sing
of a world where bullets melt into bells. Listen to the bell
in a city where cannons from the armies of the Great War
sank into molten metal bubbling like a vat of chocolate,
and the many mouths that once spoke the tongue of smoke
form the one mouth of a bell that says: I was born of cannons,
but now I sing of a world where cannons melt into bells.

Listen to the bells in a town with a flagpole on Main Street,
a rooster weathervane keeping watch atop the Meeting House,
the congregation gathering to sing in times of great silence.
Here the bells rock their heads of bronze as if to say:
Melt the bullets into bells, melt the bullets into bells.
Here the bells raise their heavy heads as if to say:
Melt the cannons into bells, melt the cannons into bells.
Here the bells sing of a world where weapons crumble deep
in the earth, and no one remembers where they were buried.
Now the bells pass the word at midnight in the ancient language
of bronze, from bell to bell, like ships smuggling news of liberation
from island to island, the song rippling through the clouds.

Now the bells chime like the muscle beating in every chest,
heal the cracks in the bell of every face listening to the bells.
The chimes heal the cracks in the bell of the moon.
The chimes heal the cracks in the bell of the world.

^{(para la bisabuela I never knew)}             

Our lineage—eight burros fencing
             a single aguacate tree in the middle
             of an open field. This is where
you kneel, hide behind the blinking eyes,
             soft bellies of a breathing shield,
             tails smacking at buzz-stung air.

Torches burn barns to the ground
             behind you, daughters grasping
             both your hands, youngest slung
across your breast like La Adelita’s bandolera
             all because you packed a lunch, tied
             a sprig of mint in your son’s hat.

The soldiers said he was feeding
             the wrong side, so they bound
             his hands and marched him blind-
folded three days to the next village,
             where a noose wreathed his neck,
             feet planted like stones on a crate.

What if you hadn’t burst in, breathless
             and begging just before they kicked
             it out from under him; from under
the church that received his sunbeaten
             body, soaked rags, and wrang drops
             of water on clay lips; from under

the train that hauled him north
             with the woman who housed seeds
             that would sprout ears perked for each
other’s screaming when she pushed all of us
             into the singed world with no ring
             of stubborn creatures to shield us?