When ships sink, rich are often better off.
Sure, steerage is a poor place for a bed?
Perhaps on ships that god’s creation scoff,
not on twain boats by greed and folly wed.
Five men’s expensive lark is deemed a quest;
six hundred desperate migrants deemed a crime.
For all, the seas will work at death’s behest,
while some, anonymous, will drown through time.
Crammed in a baby submarine, they pay
small fortunes for a glimpse of gutted steel.
Crammed in a boat hid on a darkened quay,
their last coins flung to spin fate’s crooked wheel.
Five smiling faces in the tv’s glow
share air time with the rescue ships on scene.
Uncounted dead an afterthought below,
are scrawled across the bottom of the screen.
Men die because they yearn for something more –
once-in-a-lifetime trips shared with a child,
life’s last chance for a child, hopeless, poor,
– to bright horizons and dark depths beguiled.
Now five lie on an inky ocean floor,
while nameless hundreds bob on warmer seas:
five near those who had sought the New World’s shore,
far more float toward the ancient Cyclades.
In all the homes the hungry families fled,
there’s no need now to succor or to bless:
one hundred million spent to find five dead,
while those who seek new lives ask so much less.
John MacLean is a retired teacher who has also been a mill hand, merchant seaman, and assistant district attorney. His collection, The Long Way Home, is published by Cayuga Lake Books. His book on teaching, If You Teach It, They Will Read, is published by Rowan and Littlefield. He appeared on Poetry Potion’s Poem a Day on November 7, 2022.