A child sits next to its dead mother near a bombed-out bridge

By Thomas Davis

staring emptily at blue sky, no tears in her blue eyes.

The Russian Putin, eyes burning even though there is deadness in them,
smiles as women with long hair and beautiful voices sing
a celebration into being, praising him, shining into his manhood.

An Australian man wades
through water up to his chest as a tree trunk, floating on waters
polluted with the sewage and debris of a once prosperous town,
sails toward where he is struggling to reach dry land.
In yet another world.
A tornado, in a month that almost never has tornadoes, 
strikes a farmhouse, collapsing the roof onto the screams 
of a child not the child staring at an empty Ukrainian sky.
In yet in another world, 
a fire tornado explodes into a smoke-clogged sky,
leaping roaring flames through the crowns of trees
as a town’s homes are consumed by dancing, searing flames.
In yet another world 
a line of children with distended bellies struggle, 
with their mothers, to reach a makeshift hospital, 
large eyes seeing nothing but the gnawing exhaustion of hunger.

In Greenland, one glacier after another 
splashes massive ice cliffs into seawaters swelling
outward into concentric half circles of waves.
In Iowa and sub-Saharan Africa, birds of prey
circle above a dry landscape of shriveled crops
as hot sun mocks the thought that clouds and rain
can bring life to the earth again.
In a hospital in Sturgeon Bay, a daughter
sits in the parking lot as her mother struggles to breathe
as a doctor and nurses are putting her on a ventilator
in a desperate attempt to save her life.

President Trump in DC, standing beside a dark red Tesla
and a grinning Elon Musk shills for a man
causing children in Africa to die of AIDs and starvation.

On the television set, after seeing a missile explode 
into a high-rise apartment where two dozen people have died, 
an analyst tells us how angry people are about rising gas prices.
Then a commercial urges us to improve our lives 
by purchasing a brand new, elegant, black showerhead
to help us cleanse ourselves.