The most unsettling thing about "It started that morning" is how calm it sounds. Lisa Alvarado describes an act of mass killing, and the poem suggests the victims are children, yet she never uses the vocabulary of crime or news reporting. She borrows the language of the farm instead: seeds, fallow fields, planting, pruning, rain. The poem is less about what happened than about how a mind can make something monstrous sound like ordinary work.
The central metaphor appears in the opening stanza. "All his sorrows were seeds," we are told, and the town is "a fallow field." Fallow land is empty, resting, waiting to be used, so in the man's eyes the town is a blank space where his private pain can be sown and harvested. The line "Inside his head, it was spring" is the most disturbing of all, because spring is normally a season of hope. Here it marks the arrival of a plan. Then comes the voice, which "hissed" at first and later "roared." The hiss recalls a tempting serpent, and the roar suggests a compulsion growing too loud to resist. The poem never says whether the voice is illness, rage or something else, and that ambiguity is wise. It refuses to hand the reader a tidy explanation.
The second stanza is the shortest and perhaps the most human. "Mother stood in his way, trying to stop / What he knew must be done." Alvarado writes "Mother," not "his mother," as if the word were a name, and for a moment the man seems like a child. Her small act of resistance is all the poem allows of love or reason. His answer is the chilling "Time to prune, he thought." Pruning means cutting away to help something grow, so the word shows self-deception at work. He has turned destruction into care, and that distorted logic is what the poem most wants us to see.
The form matches this cold tidiness. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only short, plain lines that read almost like instructions: "Tools in hand, / He found the place / Where the children were." The sentences are blunt, and the verbs are simple and physical: "pounded," "roared," "fell." Even the alliteration of "pulse pounded" is restrained, a heartbeat rather than a flourish. Alvarado saves her one real surprise for the break between "It rained" and "Bullets." The line ending lets us expect a farmer's rain, the kind that feeds seeds, and then the single word on its own line destroys that expectation. The metaphor has been building towards this point, and the white space after the word gives it the weight of a silence.
The pace changes again with "They fell. / They all fell. / And he was the last." The repetition feels like counting, and the verb "fell" belongs to harvested stalks or leaves as much as to people. The phrase "he was the last" implies, without stating it, that the man dies too. Alvarado does not linger on blood or on his motives. She cuts away, which is more affecting than description would be.
The final stanza shifts from past tense to present: "What is left is a field. / Flowers weeping every day. / Never ceasing." The field from the first stanza returns, but it is no longer fallow. It is full of flowers, which I read as memorial tributes, though they also suggest a graveyard that has become a garden. The man's metaphor of growth has come true in the cruelest way. Giving the flowers the human act of weeping hands the grief back to the living, and "Never ceasing" tells us that the mourning has no season and no end.
The poem matters because it avoids both sensationalism and easy answers. The man is never named, and neither are the children, the town or the date, so the poem can stand for any such tragedy. By letting us hear his reasoning in the language of spring and pruning, it shows how violence can disguise itself, and by ending on the weeping flowers it makes sure the last word belongs to the grief.