January 2020
Author's Note:
There seems to be no limit to the evil that can be done by heartless people, but sometimes it feels like there’s a limit to how much carnage (literal or figurative)
one person can stand to see being done to others. Here are some thoughts on what happens when the alarms keep going off.
breaking point
alarm fatigue was introduced to me when
as a young nurse newly come to intensive care
i was instructed not to succumb to the deafness
that comes with the tenth alarm of the night
so many of the beeps, bells, and buzzers
were patently false and could be triggered
by a patient's snore, an opening door
a visitor tripping over a cord
nine times out of ten was the statistic used
to illustrate that the one alarm i might be
tempted to tune out would be the one
that signaled death's circling dance
and left unchecked, would open the gates
to heaven or hell or the hospital morgue
prematurely and permanently without apology
and what would i say then to my manager
a lifetime later, and the alarms still shout
though the statistics have been upended
it is now only one of ten that falsely calls
the rest protest the hungry death that circles
democracy. this nation so conceived and so dedicated
that even civil war could not disembowel it
and yet we have become the monsters we decried
we rip apart families and futures with blood of ICE
families to the left, families to the right
cowered and begged, yet into the fray
charged six hundred agents, intent
on passing their quota of orphans and widows
the alarms are growing louder by the hour
mass shootings, mass arrests, mass deportations
mass incarcerations, mass perjury, mass hysteria
until i cry "no mas, no mas, no mas!"
©2020 j.lewis
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the
author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual.
It is very important. -FF