You step over them and go about your day.
No time to be concerned; that lesson you’ve already learned.
Bad things happen with your conscience in the way.
So you act like nothing’s happened,
not your problem after all.
As long as you’re still standing, everybody else can fall.
You feel it’s not your obligation to investigate.
Your life is too important; you can’t risk being late.
You ignore the blood and chalk lines
that signify the slaughter
of someone’s mother, father, sister, brother, son or daughter.
You fail to see that every time another body falls,
since we are all in this together, the loss impacts us all.
Chalk lines on the pavement, a harsh representation
of all the carnage that has been created in this nation.
We need lines around the corpses
of kindness and compassion.
Greed and anger executed them, for they were not in fashion.
Off in bags the bodies go, hauled away like trash collection
to become a one-inch story in the morning metro section.
You could not care less about the pain another murder brings.
It’s not your problem until the moment
that your cell phone rings.
Hysterically, you scream; no one bothered to assist
as blood poured out the body of the person you had kissed
as you rushed off to work to face another day,
stepping over everybody you passed along the way.
© 2007 Joyce M Sanders
From “Divergent Paths”