The Lives of Towns of Human Lives

Peruse the news not for the news

But to absorb the many towns

News covers, and their differences.

Some people, just a few hundred,

Live in Jarratt, Virginia—small,

Scruffy community in green,

Nondescript, second-growth woodland

Housing the town’s main employer,

A deli meat plant that appears

Like a low, boxy fungal sprawl

Of pale buildings and parking lots

In a field scraped out of the woods,

Where a scandal has erupted

About contaminated meat.

Meanwhile millions of people live

In about the same acreage

In the legendary city of Cairo,

Where it’s so unbearably hot

These days it only comes alive

At night, when the streets overflow

With people—there’s just not enough

Fuel to avoid daily blackouts

And despite the crowds out at night,

A deep gloom pools under the lights,

And in interviews locals say

Things like, Everybody is dead

On the inside. They’ve surrendered;

They’re down. Egypt is a graveyard.

Maracaibo, Venezuela,

Rose on an abundance of oil,

But there people aren’t just depressed.

Recent hard times have been so hard,

A quarter of the city left.

Neighborhoods of abandoned homes

Could each pocket the citizens

Of all of Jarratt, Virginia,

With houses to spare—but no jobs.

Nobody seems to be fleeing,

Or so down they’re dead, in Görlitz,

Saxony, abutting Poland,

With an advanced economy,

Diversified enterprises,

A good fifty-five thousands folks,

A power plant beside the lake.

But the coal industry’s near death.

Nativist sentiment’s rising,

Along with right-wing politics—

Think of the border, the places

Hemorrhaging people elsewhere,

People so different from Germans

Who are being allowed in here!

Our way of life must be preserved!

That’s not the worry in Pokrovsk,

Ukraine,

Dead in the path of the surging

Russian war machine. One more place

People are more than despairing,

They’re fleeing, and not gradually.

Trains are filling up every seat

With the town’s old inhabitants

Suddenly themselves refugees.

A sampling. That’s all. A sampling,

Unrepresentative, of towns

Around the world where humans live

That happen to be in the news

For their recent ways of being

Diversely unfortunate. Years

Will haul this metal-cored pebble

A few more times around its star,

Just a few will do, and these towns

Will no longer be in the news—

Well, none except maybe Cairo.

Cairo’s an historical beast

So large and ancient it can make

It’s own fuel for newsworthiness.

But there are so many places,

Each with its own sets of stories,

Where humans have pockmarked the Earth,

And you know they’re all connected

If you squint a bit, but they feel

Like so many wandering worlds,

Untethered, lost in their stories.