THE NEWS YOU DON"T GET AT HOME
The news you don't get at home
is in the dangling flesh of peasants and workers,
in the silenced tongues of poets and journalists,
in the machine-gunned remains of women and children.
The news you don't get at home
is molded, packaged, abbreviated,
synthesized, and castrated,
through the phone lines,
from the bleeding pens of eyeless stooges
who went to all the fine schools,
worked on all the fine newspapers,
who covered the great wars
("Hey, is this Lebanon or El Salvador?")
who wired in the fabrications to fit the ignorance,
who sat in small, dingy hotels with great scotch
and claimed to be truthsayers.
Somehow these "journalists" failed to see
the election fraud; the names of the dead
resurrected on election rosters
(and they say there are no miracles in this world!).
They failed to see the trucked-in thugs
from out of town
and the death threats carved on the inside
of a woman's thigh.
The news you don't get at home
is in the withered eye sockets
of emaciated faces, seeking food,
seeking redress, seeking emancipation-
oh, such a word!
It rarely makes the sweaty copy
of these "objective observers,"
these TV-bred, English 101 graduates
who know where the semicolons go
but who couldn't find the heart of humanity
in an outstretched hand.
--from The Concrete River, Curbstone Press, 1996