There is war across the stream, I’ve read.
And corruption over the wall.

There is a dire need I’ve seen to feed
the hungry over there—

Perhaps we’ll find it, we Nation, within our purses
to bargain with such backwardness.

To push the inside-out-ness across the pond
and over the bridge to other places

where such sin belongs.

I voted for the men and women who
raked the evils to tomorrow and over there;

to the places that—beer in hand and
TV crackling—I cannot say I know very well (at all).

To the places so foreign even our shared humanity is
no more real than Landlord Mercy.

Still—something moans inside my conscience
like the grazing hum of locusts.

Even I know there are so many walls, so many streams,
so many lands to skip and souls to sour before

the round world brings the desperate
back to me.