The News

I was sat perched at the table, famished, for my dinner,
Save those couple of chocolates, I’d stuffed earlier,
I switched on the telly; the news was on, background music as always,
I sat fixed to the chair in delightful anticipation,
When flickers of sound and movement, caught my eye,
I looked up from a table, decked out in cutlery.

To the tears of an elderly man,
baffled and shattered by the bitter bullets of reality,
ripping his only son from this earth,
prior to his massacre, the village had been in a draught,
parched for days, lured to his death, by the promise of water,
I cleared my plate, with a twisting churning stomach, fulling with pangs of guilt.