One Second

A poem about war on TV

He is pleading for his life on grainy video, probably a camera phone, the wobble of unsteady hands making it real. The wonder of film smooths out edges, dirty spots. Murder on film is beautiful, a cool cascade of artistic bullets, droplets of blood slowed so they create Rorschach canvases, something to buy at auction houses with names ending in — orf. But video is life, as marketing executives understand, made into billion-dollar empires, an industry of seeing how close the camera can zoom. What dignity in watching a boy, brown as nutmeg, on his knees before arbitrary AK-47s? The guns don’t care. They have no mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, waiting for them to come home.

His words fall, empty. You can see it in his eyes as he speaks. In the dirt, there is scattered debris of his subversive mission: a broken basket, rice, tubers waiting for mouths, unreceiving. Thin as a stick, a chain of arms and hearts linking him to others, his body speaking now, hands raised, universal.

Faster than the beat of a pop song, the camera judders with contact, a shaking hand, a hand-shaking staccato as the guns speak.

Video end.