When Will Humanity Be Humane?
In Gaza they are marched into a cave,
Bloodied, hands bound behind them,
The dark swallowing them one by one.
Here they are marched into a cage,
Bloodied, hands bound behind them,
The gate counting them one by one.
A white flag lifted in a broken street
Is answered from close enough
To part the hair.
In Minnesota, a neighbor
Who stepped in for a neighbor
Is answered the same way.
Somewhere past the cameras, Tehran.
We haven't seen it yet.
When the lenses finally get in,
Will it look like Hiroshima the next morning,
A city pressed flat as a dry flower,
A shadow burned into the bank steps
Of someone waiting for it to open?
Crassus kept a fire brigade.
When a house in Rome began to burn
He bought it from the weeping owner,
Cheap, while it burned,
And only then
Let his men put out the flames.
Those we elected do that too -
Burn us down and buy us cheap.
The story tells us Crassus drank his greed.
All his gold poured down his throat, molten.
The fire saith not, It is enough.
One man's hunger adored —
The obsequious,
The adulators,
The sycophants,
And the silent,
Who cost the least and do the most.
And us, exhausted,
Driving to work, paying the bill.
The daily striving of getting on
Enabling this.
No, affirming it.
And yet,
A woman pulls over for a stranger on the shoulder.
A man steps between the baton and the boy.
Someone in the boardroom
Sees it and says it.
So few. Just a pinch.
Not enough to fill a palm.
Enough to keep the whole of it
From rotting.
You are the salt of humanity -
The plumb line of ‘humane’.
Salt stings in the wound.
No one invites salt to the table
For being sweet.
And salt that has lost its savor,
Measured by the plumb line
And found leaning,
Is good for nothing
But to be thrown out
And trodden under foot.
Look down.
That dull white grit on the pavement,
It was salt once.
Put a finger to your tongue.
Are you still salt?
Hold a handful to the light:
Every grain throws its own small spark.
One voice is one grain.
Enough of them, and the world
Hears the symphony
That saves it from itself.
