}} After I Show My Students a Documentary on Yezidi Women, I Go Back to My Office and Confess |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










After I Show My Students a Documentary on Yezidi Women, I Go Back to My Office and Confess

Forgive me for knowing a class on ISIS rape is no longer a risky endeavor. No one even complained of being triggered.

For booking a lunch date after class, knowing there will be no weepy student aftermath or need to process.

Forgive me for knowing who will win the synaptic battles of competing stimuli
in the great College Attention Wars,

For knowing their sorrow will be instantly pecked and scattered by flocks of tweets and texts, 100 google searches.

Forgive the iphones for their force fields, their gravitational pull, sapping their empathy, even when turned off.

Forgive us the small squirt of delight after each email’s beheading.

Forgive them their nimble fingers, flying from Snapchat, to Syria,
Instagram to Sudan all in the time it takes for the light to turn green.

Forgive us our brain’s cramped bardo, stuffed with the strays of CNN,
lining our million neural pathways, begging.

Forgive us for no longer knowing how to let the slowest of empathies unfurl.
Do they eventually sail off like milkweed? Would the Yazidi see them in the sky like brilliant red kites and feel less alone? Alas, I’ve done it again.

Forgive me for wanting suffering, theirs and ours, to always end in beauty.
 
 
 
← Adrie Kusserow