Reconciling
My mind is dumfounded, as I watch the nightly news,
Showing clips of Mark McGwire, with his bloated muscles,
Hammering human-growth-hormone, anabolic-steroid home runs,
Tearfully insisting that his use of drugs contributed not a single hit
To his record-setting statistics,
Followed by a ten-minute report on the accumulating corpses
Of countless earthquake-undertaken Haitians
In the streets of Port-au-Prince, their stench choking survivors,
Who are dying of starvation, thirst, infected wounds,
Separated from families, themselves, bereft even of desperation,
Leaving me to ask my imagination what I might conceivably do
To correlate, reconcile such disparate human conditions,
Diminish the distance between moral hypocrisy and physical atrocity,
The former so despicably disillusioning to the spirit,
The latter so merciless, murderous to it. I switch channels.
01/13/10
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