David Bowden Poems

I am ten years old
overalls and jelly shoes
and I watch as my mother replaces the lights in our garden with 10 small solar laterns.
Stretched on my tip-toes helping her hang them, she tells me of their magic
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When the lord avalokiteshvara looked down at the human world, he cried a single tear for all suffering and lost desires that ravaged his people.
He wept, the tear streaming down his face and forming a great pond. From the depths of its water sprang a blue lotus, and on the lotus appeared Tara: clad in the silks and jewels of a princess, but born with the mark of anguish inside her

Tara was cast out by her lord
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...but the sacred love we manifest unto others
can be just as harmful as the hate within.
And so we must learn
how to properly love the people we love.
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Warning
Trigger warning
There has been another mass shooting on U.S. soil
We mean trigger warning
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Psalm told through nine-gun deaths in America

Wednesday afternoon and a boy tongues the barrel of an AR-15, brewing a spit full of hate. A thousand miles away, I walk out of 5th period chemistry and America spills its blood bone-dry until its river runs empty, until the stars on the flag look more like exit wounds.
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March 24th.
One month and ten days after the deadliest high school shooting in American history.
Students across the country marched for stricter gun laws.
The same day, the NRA releases a video entitled ‘A march for their lies'
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