We used to flinch at blood.
Now we sip our coffee,
carry on with our dreams,
while a mother screams.
It doesn’t matter
If another city burns on screen.
Grief scrolls by,
Wrapped in filters and hashtags.
We tap a heart
And call it feeling.
The child under the rubble isn’t ours,
So we look away.
Empathy,
She was once the pulse beneath our ribs,
The hand that trembled toward the wounded.
Now she is a faint knocking
at our locked hearts.
What have we become to look upon pain
and call it news?
We have learnt to comfortably live beside cruelty,
To build walls so high
We call them peace.
But somewhere,
a stranger still stops,
still kneels beside the fallen,
still reaches out a trembling hand.
And sometimes,
In the quiet between tragedies,
If one heart still breaks,
There’s still something left to save.
I wrote this poem out of a sense of quiet anger and sorrow, watching how easily people move past tragedy when it isn’t their own.
In a world numbed by constant exposure from social media, endless news cycles and daily suffering. We have learned to live beside cruelty, to wear silence like armour and to call it peace.
As Dennis Lehane writes,
“Sympathy is easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking at someone else in the eye and realizing you could be them, and all that separates you is luck”.
We are all shaped by what we experience and this harsh world is slowly numbing and desensitizing us to the pain and suffering of others.
Like Greta Thunberg said,
“I am scared of the world that has seemingly lost all sense of humanity.”
Empathy is the thread that binds us. The innate trait that unites us in our common humanity. Let this poem be a self-reflection and a reminder for us to remain empathetic and compassionate so that there is something still left to save. A call to feel again, to listen again and to care while we still can.
