Watching the Eyes of Children

Eliot Katz

On TV news live from Albania's refugee camps,
children describe in minute details what no children
should be able to describe-
a home torched here, a parent stabbed above the chest there,
a lifetime of nightmares sculpted in thirty seconds
before Kosovo's adolescent eyes.
Behind the reporter's microphone, an old woman
is lifted onto stretcher in near-death spasms-
eery the lack of men visible wandering among
the windblown tents.
Despite the presence of apologists and the absence
of slaughter's video footage-
stories overlap enough to know Milosevic's massacres
are seeping widely through earth's blindfolded cracks.

Meanwhile, Nato has answered an age-old question:
yes, under the good name of humanitarianism-
it is possible to do worse than nothing.
Clinton and Blair's poll-driven military recipe is guaranteed
only to spare American & West European lives.
These dumb Cruise Missiles haven't learned yet
whether the Serb painting a target on his head
has voted for Milosevic or not-
and haven't the slightest idea how to protect
a single Kosovar Albanian
Like compulsive gamblers wreaking yet another night
of random carnage,
the more these bombardiers fail today, the more they
double down their rotten bets tomorrow.

At the end of the millennium, there is no protective cloth
nor honest conversation being mass produced,
and less room left on this shrinking planet for subtlety
or innocence.