Tuesday, April 7, 2009

7/30: DEAD BOY'S MOM SAYS SHE KNEW OF BEATINGS

A Little Rock Air Force Base airman admitted
in Pulaski County court Monday that she knew
her husband had been beating her 2-year-old son for months
before the toddler died at the hands
of his stepfather — her husband — in 2007.

There are (at least) one hundred and fifty people
dead in Italy, just because the ground felt
like shaking. I don't understand it. Ten times
that many are wounded, and ten time *that* many
are homeless. I guess God just can't be
everywhere all the time.

In the meantime, some boys calling themselves
Tar Heels are blowing everyone in North Carolina's
minds, racking up points and winning games.
I know these things because I read the newspaper,
you see.

Not so long ago it was that I read a story about
orangutans, and how they're going extinct, probably
in my own lifetime. Read how there was a group of people
out in the wilderness working with the orangutans,
teaching them to fish, to use tools, to hunt. Did you know
orangutans don't know how to swim? I'd had no idea.
But these people were teaching them how so they could learn
to save their own lives.

And I wonder why nobody taught that little two-year-old
baby to swim.

2 comments:

Landon said...

Wow! Very thought provoking. I wish I had come up with this idea!

Ginna FunkWallace said...

Me too. Writing about the newspaper is as old as... well, newspapers. Go on and pick you one up. There are all sorts of poems waiting. Classifieds, stories, advertisements, cutting and scribbling words from articles to put together into new poems...