What can a poem hope to accomplish
in a world
where men and women differing
only in circumstance
from you and me
have been displaced
by ethnic violence
war and drought
and by the cries
of hungry children
one in a hundred of us
somewhere in the world
the number only grows
while everywhere
the nations build up walls
as though the moat
they make around their sand castles
will save them
from the rising human tide