don't worry. the best we can is generally never enough.

i know exactly how you feel and feel it most of the time.

my main critique would be that this piece sort of needs to be more grotesque, which may or may not make it utterly appalling. but that would be the point, it must be the point.
there are some really good lines in here, and all i'd really like is expansion.
your topic is huge in so many ways, and the poem could reflect that better, more grossly.

we're all guilty, anyway.

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when she walked, her knees cracked like a pick-up truck driving full-force over a deer carcass.
~stupidvagina

I agree that it could be even more grotesque and still be appropriate, if not proportionate.

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Forever after, The End.

I do believe you're right. I think it's because my original prompting came from an article with a fairly measured and unemotive tone. I'll get something a bit stronger in there now I have a whole day's worth of perspective to draw on.

Thanks.

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you're welcome.

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when she walked, her knees cracked like a pick-up truck driving full-force over a deer carcass.
~stupidvagina

"internally displaced - deep in my gut" makes 'internally' redundant. actually i'm not sure about lines 2 3 and 4 their significance seems reduced for 3 lines and even incomplete (if it was deep in your gut isn't it obvious that it was internal, and what does 'displaced' mean in regards to that 'Something' that constitutes the first line? how was it displaced? what was its original place?).

there's a repetition also that there's no water to drink, if you think it's really necessary you should use the second opportunity to expand on it conceptually or at least to introduce new elements visually.

i don't like (to me) it seems like banal clarification (the reader assumes this is YOUR opinion entirely, furthermore you use 'i' in the same line which extends the obviousness that it is yours).

i don't mind the arbitrary punctuation at spots but i don't like it either.

"It's a
sad episode in a soap opera
a greek tragedy, catharsis
purgation."

i'm not great on that part, first because a sad episode in a soap opera does not compare in my opinion to what happens to the people you're talking about OR to a greek tragedy, in fact i see some major oppository differences between the 3. then the part where it goes 'catharsis purgation', i'm not sure that fits in right, it seems like brief stream of consciousness gone wrong, cathartic purgation would be better but it would still need a connector, if not gramatical then visual.

ok overall, i thought this was good although it seems a little graphic. however, i find it hard to imagine a poem of this nature being non-graphic. good work.

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deviant art will ban you for being mean.

The "internally displaced" relates to the people involved. "Internally displaced" is a media buzzword used to describe people who are effectively refugees although they haven't crossed an international border and so can't be counted as such in statistics.

This needs work, and a lot of it. Thanks for the detailed response.

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Hmmm... I can understand this pretty well. The way I see it we are exposed to so much terror and horror every day (whether it be the news, the latest movie or an accident on the highway) that we're almost entirely numb to it. Ethnic Cleansing. It's no longer about people or children or death. It's ethnic cleansing, summed up so neatly in two words. So true, rarely do we look deeper than those words. As for helping. There really isn't any great improvement we can make as individuals.

But as they say, even changing one life is enough. So I guess the best you can do is just smile at strangers, hoping they'll pass it on.

topic.
(and just that one word took me three tries)
is spelt wrong at the end.
poems can change the world. how i wish this one would.

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Never overestimate the speed of an old man crossing the road.

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As an angle with which to expose the horrors of modern warfare in the face of such over-exposure to those horrors, I found your equation of ethnic cleansing with your own pursuit of catharsis through writing a bold and honest one.
We have been shown the images so often and so graphically the only shock left (for us in the cushioned west) is the shock of seeing our complacency and our enervated hand-wringing unmasked as just another aspect of the same betrayal and brutality; being shown just as complicit in the way we tut! and sob, and speak pious, sensitive words in an attempt show ourselves apart from those brutal regimes, to be a different and better breed of humanity.
So I don't agree with your earlier comentators when they call upon you to be more graphic, more grotesque - they want that, they can tune into any nightly newscast. Better for me would be to see you pursue more this theme of the moral cleansing we each perform in the face of atrocities like these.

It's interesting that you refer to the term ethnic cleansing as a euphemism. It has made think about how over time and with the accretions of meaning, phrases grow heavier and darker, and become more menacing. From final solution to cultural revolution now friendly fire and increasingly collateral damage these one-time euphemisms, along with ethnic cleansing occupy the darker niches of the language, until nobody can any longer use them to mask the horrors they imply.