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Spectacles.
The screaming shells on television smoked
not milky as our boiling dinner’s steam.
No smolder could unhinge my daughter’s cries
her smallest terrors loomed astride that screen.
All relegated to those few square inches
as much to their pain as we would afford
so tanks could be eclipsed by errant gestures
and laughter peals outcackle airstrike roars.
But one night then I saw the bloody newsstream,
and watched it as a window in a prison.
I caught, for once, the bias of my mind
and glimpsed the twin flaws ever of our vision:
What's vast and far seems dwarfed by smallness near.
What’s seen each day will cease to reappear.
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