“I am so tired of waiting, aren’t you, for the world to be become good and beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife and cut the world in two and see what worms are eating at the rind.”

Langston Hughes, 1929 graduate of Lincoln University

Early on the morning of October 26 – just 12 hours after a mass shooting left one dead and six injured at Lincoln University - the Chester County Press reporter drove to the university’s campus and found it eerily silent, lifeless and empty, as if it had absorbed the blow of too many assaults on its dignity and could no longer sustain the pain and was choosing now to shut itself down in order to survive.

In the quiet hum, all that could be heard were the birds, who happily fluttered in the treetops that draped the buildings of this historic and bucolic acreage of learning, and the only reminders of joy were in the form of large white tents and balloon configurations and a sign that read “Welcome Lions” – reminders of the Homecoming Weekend that had taken place there in the days prior to the shootings.

The reporter was there to perform the necessary evil of journalism – to jab a recorder into the faces of people who had perhaps witnessed the melee that broke out at the university’s International Cultural Center (ICC) hours before and ask them to recount what they saw. Some chose not to respond, while others whispered their accounts of revelers being reduced to trapped prisoners seeking any means of escape from the ringing out of gunfire. They jumped over fences, they told the reporter; they ran past tennis courts and past the football stadium in search of safe places, and once there, struggled to process the moment when their worst fears were suddenly realized.

On Saturday evening, just as the post-game celebration began and where hundreds of current and former Lincoln students gathered in the parking lot of the ICC building, their purpose was to show their Lion pride in all forms of pageantry. On Sunday morning, as the reporter took a distant glance at the ICC Building, almost entirely encircled by a police tape boundary and campus security, he saw that it had been converted into a crime scene. Reminders of the calamity were everywhere, and somewhere in all of that debris were the casings of the bullets that were fired by 21-year-old suspect Zecqueous Morgan-Thompson and quite possibly others, and so too was the blood of 20-year-old Jujuan Jeffers who was killed in the mass shooting.

In the wake of the tragedy that came to Lincoln University this past Saturday night, every sacred word ever written or spoken by our country’s most celebrated poets and leaders and heroes about dreams and dignity and resilience and social justice – many of whom have shared these words at Lincoln University - were suddenly reduced to flimsy prayers soggy with naivete. Our nation’s finest words – our nation’s touchstones - had again been upstaged by what happens when conflict is conveniently accompanied by a weapon, and the shootings that took place at Lincoln University reaffirmed that our nation’s collective rage does not wait for our better angels to intervene.

How impressionable to believe that poems could ever stop bullets. The worms have always found something to eat at the rind.