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Empathy
My love, I’m grateful tonight
Our listing bed isn’t a raft
Precariously adrift
As we dodge the coast guard light,
And clasp hold of a girl and a boy.
I’m glad we didn’t wake
Our kids in the thin hours, to take
Not a thing, not a favorite toy,
And didn’t hand over our cash
To one of the smuggling rackets,
That we didn’t buy cheap life jackets
No better than bright orange trash
And less buoyant. I’m glad that the dark
Above us is not deeply twinned
Beneath us, and moiled with wind,
And we don’t scan the sky for a mark,
Any mark, that demarcates a shore
As the dinghy starts taking on water.
I’m glad that our six-year-old daughter,
Who can’t swim, is a foot off the floor
In the bottom bunk, and our son
With his broken arm’s high and dry,
That the ceiling is not seeping sky,
With our journey but hardly begun.
Empathy isn’t generous,
It’s selfish. It’s not being nice
To say I would pay any price
Not to be those who’d die to be us.
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A.E. Stallings is an American poet in Greece. She has published four volumes of verse and a selected poems (This Afterlife), the last with Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the U.S. and Carcanet in the U.K. She has also published three volumes of verse translation, most recently an illustrated The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice with Paul Dry Books. A prose book, Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters, and their Friends Framed the Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon, is just out with Paul Dry Books. Stallings is currently the Oxford Professor of Poetry. [Author photo by Kostas Mantziaris.]
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Théodore Géricault, The Raft of Medusa (1818-19), oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris