The world’s attention is fixed, while people not on our screens don’t get commercial breaks. A poem for Palestine.
who won? I said
The game’s still on, they said.
And I became the ghost I always was
drifting between channels in my unease.
But I’d given it my all,
while the broadcasts flickered on their way
to commercial breaks, when I overheard
I was counting bodies beneath concrete slabs
to make sense of numbers on my screen when a child
disappeared into rubble in Gaza
and I felt such shame over the practiced
normalcy of my Sunday
I was not watching,
for I can pretend interest
in the spectacle, just as they
in the great loud stadium
must forget.
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