Grotesque Wealth Inequities
Boy on the Skin of an Airplane
They say, “the journey is everything,”
with our destination always and forever the same,
but what of those journeys in which one man
rides in the comfort of an airplane, first class, no less,
with his needs, his wants, and, yes, even his whims met:
champagne in a fluted glass, haute cuisine prepared
as he waits in air-conditioned, spacious room of luxury,
leaning back in refined leather chair, smoking a fat cigar,
the man smiling in his firm conviction of the right
that he holds power over the powerless:
how he spends his waking days; how he destroys
or pardons with a wink or a signature while
a teen boy scrambles desperately, fruitlessly
trying hold onto the skin of an aircraft
about to take off from an airfield under siege,
while his unwed, pretty younger cousin cowers
before entering soldiers tear her apart.
That journey of the child in the gutted streets,
that child whose skin blisters and whose eyes burn,
a child without love or consoling after the death
of her mother in a bombing raid by a side she never took
all the while that aircraft with a most comfortable man
takes off into bluer skies toward the pleasure of one
at the expense of millions. How is it that anyone
wonders about the human need for the invention
of gods and most terrible judgement after death
for those seen as enemy in this most discriminate
journey with billions of paths but only one destination?
Recent Posts
See AllNovember 8, election day, will be a tipping point for American democracy. We voters will be motivated by any one of many controversies...
Holding their military grade weapons, Trump fanatics menaced FBI headquarters just outside the building in Phoenix, Arizona on Saturday,...
Comments