By Fran Finley

Warriors Of Change

Oh young brave souls
Let your music out
Sing your songs of sorrow
As you weave for yourself
Cloaks of change
Paint your innocent faces
With the color of blood
And sky and earth
Lay your hand over
Your wounded heart
And pledge allegiance
To end the violence
Spreading upon this land
Take an accounting of your loss
Manifest your anger
In a monument built to house
A new day of freshness
To birth a new way
A new path
For the old to follow
As you pull apart the rotting fabric
That has been sewn of late
By a generation who
Dismissed as unmoored
Youthful energy
Attached to technology
Not looking up into the world
But oh so brave you now have become
Passion for change
You have tasted
As you lasso the text
And tweet the words to
Roust young warriors
You be the saviors
Wrapped in your
Uniforms of freshness
And march to the
Highest hill in the land
To plant the flag of change
You Can! You Can!

And we will forever be changed
By you and your stand
To right the path we now tread

 

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Fran Finley is a member of Karen Kenyon’s Gypsy Poets. Her work has appeared in Magee Park Poet’s Anthology and the San Diego Poetry Annual. The issue of school violence is of special concern for her because of her connection to one of the first mass school shootings in the nation on December 1, 1997, at Heath High School. Fran was a counselor at the time and was asked to go to act as a grief counselor at the school.