[…]

Still they ask in podcast
and electronic ink: How are you doing?

And they keep you in their hearts, pump you
to their minds, circulate you unimagined.

Take all the space you need, they say, 
empathy loves the damaged.

You offer no solutions. Only clarity
they don’t believe, only they
get to tell the future
what to be.

Then they pump you
into their viscera, and feel you
bilious, ineffable, cast iron, butterfly.

Their questions like a shovel
that doesn’t know what earth is,
but digging anyway.

They hope you would say:
“I am multigenerational
and can fracture natural
bonds in my DNA,”

for this they can sell
to a tycoon press, a Carnegie
of thought dissemination.

And your answer comes:
“Things are a seasickness
and no land in sight.

Your peeping is no witness.”

Copyright © 2024 by Fady Joudah. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 2, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“I wrote this poem as a continued correspondence with the book that bears the same title. ‘[...]’ was written during the Israeli annihilation of Gaza and the U.S. cultural reaction to it.”
—Fady Joudah