[Newspoetry] We Remember Each Life

[Mike Lehman]

We remember each life
Read the News-Gazette headline
A whole column of statistics
Recounting the US dead
Along with the number of munitions 
Dropped on Afghanistan

Buried inside
Was just a brief mention
Hundreds, if not thousands
Of innocents
Of lives lost
Better described in the AP's view
As civilians
That our country killed
A most inconvenient fact
Amidst this clumsy attempt
To portray that the suffering
Was all done in this country
By those from somewhere else
Forgetting the suffering somewhere else
Created by this country

Barely a word
Of the children, women, and men
Of innocents in Afghanistan
The collateral damage of the attacks
Just as surely as the dead on these shores
In New York
And at the five-sided military target
Across the Potomac