Brady maybe knew that the power of his eye
Was not that he saw something new—
Not that he discovered a secret passageway into seeing
Like, say, Georgia O’Keeffe with her swervy, intimate poppies—
But that the dark eyes of the dead, gazing upward
Were something we had never seen in situ
The swollen cheeks
(as if inhaling all of life that one last time
blew their cheeks wide open and froze there)
and rising bellies and arched backs that grew
Out of the ground in Antietam
Young men who, just hours ago,
Joked about the rotgut whiskey that would likely kill them
Or talked about their wives who could shoot better than them
Or imagined the smell of blueberry pies
Now their 3,600 bodies shot in time through the cyclops lens
Of a stranger, one of Brady’s team of photographers,
exhibited in New York City
And down through time in the National Archives
Accessed on a computer by a student writing a paper
On the Civil War
And now from beyond could Brady imagine
The violence of an AK47
Would he have shown us shattered babies in a classroom
In red sticky pools that slipped across the floor
Unrecognizable to those who loved them best
Or the flattening of a nightclub
of those remaining in the disco light
after the lucky ones fled
Would he show us this carnage
To shock us out of our skins
To shame the politicians posing with their
cherubic families, with their intact limbs and full faces,
flashing their assault rifles on
Christmas cards
Or maybe he would have turned his back on it all
His ghostly self, giving up on the very idea of shame
Who will be the one to show us
When images of death have become a fetish for
Disconnected souls on the darker channels
Swimming anonymously on the Internet
Are we too far gone
to be horrified, speechless,
outraged by
Amber’s missing head?
Powerful, Meg. Thanks.