The Accounting of the Dead

Lord, if there are

6300 killed in the city

will you not avenge them?

And if there are in fact

5000 killed in the city

as was originally thought,

will you yet avenge them?

And if, after double counting

and revised figures from various embassies there are just

3900 killed in the city,

will you even avenge them?

And if, according to the New York Times

as it now seems because of the different ways in which

these difficult foreign names are written

and people forgetting to tell us

they are in fact still alive, there may only be

2800 killed in the city,

will you not still avenge them?

And if

on September 11^th 2001

6,000 children died from diahorrhea,

24,000 people died from hunger

2,700 more of measles

as they did

who will avenge them?

No-one flew planes at them

in front of the obliging cameras. They were lucky bastards, those

who died at Ground Zero.

Just like Americans.

Always in the right place

at the right time.

© Godfrey Rust
May be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes.
godfrey@wordsout.co.uk