#ParisAttack

The first thing I do is look for a final body count.

Forty dead, hostages at a concert. 

One hundred dead.  Two explosions

at a stadium.

Patrons of restaurants picked off.  One hundred

twenty dead.

Over 150.  The concert raid is over.

As if a number will help me negotiate my reaction;

is this a small, medium, large, or super-size

terroristic attack? 

I don’t feel anything.

Pictures, show me pictures.  Show me blood

in the streets, show me the faces of the bereaved.

I want to see the hostages coming out of the concert,

the stadium explode.  But then,

this image:

a body, outside a restaurant, a sheet over it,

her arm exposed, a bit of pretty jewelry

on a lifeless wrist.

I am in Paris, on that Rue,

crying at that dead woman with the sparkle

who was enjoying a Friday night out

and died for…what?

Meinke, where are you?  Where are the better poets

who see the cause-and-effect of political war from the street level,

who have better ways of describing the empathy

I tried to feel.

Here are the bodies of the good

people who died before hero came, and into the night

flees the “giant ogre dragon troll.”  Tell them how to

temper my their desire for revenge

and not attach it to the first available hooligan

some government props up as the Enemy.

I cannot feel anything.

I cry for insensitivity

because I know

on Earth, 150 dead Parisians

is a drop in the bucket as far as body counts go,

and I don’t want to cry that much this morning.