Empathy

My love, I’m grateful tonight
Our listing bed isn’t a raft
Precariously adrift
As we dodge the coast-guard light,

And clasp hold of a girl and a boy.
I’m glad that we didn’t wake
Our kids in the thin hours, to take
Not a thing, not a favorite toy,

And we didn’t hand over our cash
To one of the smuggling rackets,
That we didn’t buy cheap lifejackets
No better than bright orange trash

And less buoyant.  I’m glad that the dark
Above us, is not deeply twinned
Beneath us, and moiled with wind,
And we don’t scan the sky for a mark,

Any mark, that demarcates a shore
As the dinghy starts taking on water.
I’m glad that our six-year old daughter,
Who can’t swim, is a foot off the floor

In the bottom bunk, and our son
With his broken arm’s high and dry,
That the ceiling is not seeping sky,
With our journey but hardly begun.

Empathy isn’t generous,
It’s selfish.  It’s not being nice
To say I would pay any price
Not to be those who’d die to be us.

• About
• Also by this author

A. E. Stallings

A.E. Stallings is an American poet who has lived in Greece since 1999. She has published three volumes of translation, most recently a verse translation of Hesiod's Works and Days from Penguin Classics and The Battle Between the Frogs and Mice (Paul Dry Books). She is the author of four books of poems, most recently Like, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She has received grants and fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim, and the MacArthur foundations.

Also by A. E. Stallings (see all)

• Afterglow: An Appreciation of Robert B. Shaw’s What Remains to Be Said - September 22, 2022
• Paying (Homage to) the Ferryman - May 31, 2021
• The Poet on The Road to Sparta - October 23, 2018

Author: A. E. Stallings

A.E. Stallings is an American poet who has lived in Greece since 1999. She has published three volumes of translation, most recently a verse translation of Hesiod's Works and Days from Penguin Classics and The Battle Between the Frogs and Mice (Paul Dry Books). She is the author of four books of poems, most recently Like, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She has received grants and fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim, and the MacArthur foundations. View all posts by A. E. Stallings