The Other Side Poem by William DrewBatty

Her world,
a ball,
bounced on a hard landscape.

Her life,
silently
broken by a coded
satellite sent searing through desert sun and dust.

She plays in her concrete world.

We think she is silent behind her eyes.

She is led gently
by her sister
into the cruel
dryness
where she touches the inside of my television screen.

She drops her ball and with outstretched hands, unsteady,
leans forward to
retrieve her world -
to gain some control.

On the other side
my daughter,
aware, yet also ignorant of the terrible scene,
offers her hand to the static glass.

(5th June 2003)

Inspired after watching my daughter's response to a television news item featuring two small children in Iraq whose parents had just been killed in a bomb attack.