A Single Shot Should Never Speak

There are times when the world feels unsteady, when one act of violence reminds us how fragile both freedom and dialogue truly are. Speech is never perfect. It can be messy, uncomfortable, and even painful. Yet, it is the exchange that allows us to express a spectrum of views, freely and without fear. When a voice is cut short, we lose more than a person; we lose part of our common freedom.

This poem is written in that spirit:

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A Single Shot Should Never Speak

By Kerry Ann Wiley

One bullet on the wind,
not freedom,
not speech,
but silence driven into a throat
still shaping words.

A rooftop shadow
mistook dissent for danger,
debate for war,
and turned a forum into a grave.

The microphone fell quiet.
But the echo remains:
freedom cannot breathe
where voices are slain.

Red spills.
Still we argue
over which banners fly.
Yet the truth speaks in blood alone:
no cause, no creed,
no flag, no party
justifies the bullet that silences a voice.

So let us speak,
fierce or flawed,
in error or in fire,
but never again
with a rifle’s tongue.

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The challenge before us is simple: to keep choosing words over weapons, voices over violence. We cannot restore what has been taken, but we can honor it by refusing to let a single shot speak in our place.

Each time we raise our voices whether fierce or flawed, in error or in fire we keep alive the freedom that dies when speech is silenced. We answer violence not with echoes of the gun but with the sound of words.

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