The New Yorker clicks the Submit button

In five seconds his patience comes undone.

His fists are clenched, his knuckles white

He is not a pretty sight.

At the screen he mutters foul insults

When it doesn’t spit out his results….

…The little Somalian girl of ten

Begins her daily five-mile trek

To fetch a little pot of drinking water.

We now have a clock, the techno-gurus say

That will not miss a second in years twenty million.

A technological marvel indeed

The very thing we need!

What brains they must be

Which made this clock come to be!

How much money must have been spent

To make this a reality!

…The old and wrinkled Chilean

Shuffles to get the oil lamp

That has shed its feeble light through his years ninety-three.

Have you heard about this celebrity

Whose wardrobe, by his own admission on TV

Was adorned with over two thousand suits?

And then, there was this President

Of a nation of thousand islands

Whose vulgarly large stock of shoes

Serviced just her two feet?

…In filthy rags she stands, among many like her,

This woman in northern India

Her modesty she cares about no more,

It is the cold wind that makes her and her body sore.

More of everything we want –

Extra cheese on our hamburgers

Oh, not the regular, but the double.

The Big This, and the Big That

Our sodas – we want them large

We’re not content with the small dose of caffeine.

We don’t eat or drink all of it

We probably can’t!

…Our own children of Massachusetts

In our own backyards as it were,

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