today

the hard choice is to get past the impulse to strike
out in grief or to strike back in anger and to see
beyond the clever image crafted by sinister intent
today the hard choice the only choice is to track the
money to its root to know the sources of power from
which the mayhem is fed today the hard choice is to
seek to grasp the forces at work behind the
spectacle and to see selective outrage as the idiot’s
hammer that it is today the hard choice is to know
the fallacy of moral equivalence and to understand
why one does not kill a child because a stone is
thrown by a child at a tank today the hard choice is
to live inside the world of a child clutching at a stone
in quiet desperation to be the voice of a child torn
from the shadows of innocence by nothing less than
the rapacity of a lucky few to own whatever there is
today the hard choice is to be a child at play in a
mud ditch in Sudan a makeshift hovel on some
ravaged Gaza beach a child lighted by aboriginal
dreams a hopscotch jumper on a bloody sidewalk in
the Tenth Arrondissement . . .

Image: Photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher