The Streaming

MASSACRE in bold headlines as you walk into the coffee shop.
The news. Constantly streaming. Finding you wherever you are:
 
At home. In the car. In the grocery store or running in an endless loop
high above Times Square. The not-looking at what screams to be
 
looked at: the missing ones, the dead, the fires and the bombings,
everything ravaged, burned, cracking in a godless desert heat.
 
Or closer, moving closer in. on the streets, the homeless,
so many of them, hands held out. A dollar changing hands.
 
Or, the turning away. The refusal. The hardening as more and more
hold out their hands. The mail. The solicitations. A voice asking you to give,
 
please, won’t you give more? And everywhere the ringing of the phones.
On trains. In waiting rooms. At parties. Weddings. Funerals.
 
And once, during the third act of a play, an actor alone on the stage,
head bowed, waiting in fury for the endless ringing to end.
 
Voices saying: I can’t talk to you now. Or talking on and on.
And you hearing every word: I am in Baltimore. L.A. Spokane. New York.
 
I don’t know where I am. I just had lunch. I am getting on the plane.
I will see you tonight. Or, Not tonight. Not ever again.
 
The needing-cessation but nothing ever ceasing. The wanting
to scream but not screaming. But today, a space of silence
 
in a church where figures kneel and pray their pain may cease:
Lord, take away the pain. Among flickering candles, they pray.
 
Shattered. Shattered by a ringing phone. But still you pray.
Leaving, you pass a girl standing in the shadowed nave.
 
Holding a book bag tightly to her chest. As if it were a shield.
Two words on it, only two words: STAY HUMAN.

            -- Elizabeth Spires