About suffering

About suffering, they were wrong

The Old Masters, living within castles

never holding a box that whispers

stories, snippets, rumours,

of horrors that unfold outside concrete walls.

A smartphone and the internet

traps us all

condemns us to track dubious deaths,

Life though resilient 

is only worth the communication it gets.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance,

everything may have turned away quite leisurely from the disaster,

yet the ploughman froze on hearing the forsaken cry,

the ship with somewhere to go may have sailed calmly on

but not before the trauma of a boy falling from the sky

settled in the psyche, for generations to come.

The above poem is for the NaPoWriMo2021. Day 24. I wanted to write a reply poem to W. H. Auden's  Musée Des Beaux Arts. Hopefully, I'll do one better soon enough.