Watching TV
 
She said
"People were dyin' all over the place"
in the London Blitz..
A little girl
runs with her flesh burning
Was that Cambodia?
The people
walk with despair and a mattress
in Africa.
A man
Looks at a TV camera with a gun
in Timor.
A sailor
dies coldly in oil, fire and dark water
at Shetland's Isles.
A skull
shines whitely in a potato field
Serbian or Croatian?
A bomb
flowers with bright death eternal
in Japan.
A plane
madly dives into death's fine grey dust
in New York.
Saddam Hussein
watched a thousand bloody fires
in Iraq
The children...
Ah, the children.
They die too.
And kill.
 
Do you really feel safe?

Dawn McDonald
© August 2002

Midi: "Elecucevan le Stelle" (Tosca)
Composer: Giacomo Puccini
Sequencer: Leonard Norberg

Art: "TV World"
(Weather Office)