Empathy

Empathy by Victor Kibet Rono.
Is it a fuzzy feeling?
Is it the warm, teary trail
that quietly finds its way down the cheek?
Perhaps it is the teeth revealing themselves,
a smile, almost forgotten,
on a face that has known too much
of the earth's derailment.
His eyes plead.
Not for pleasure,
nor treasure,
but for the smallest luxury,
to smirk at the sunset once more.
He is a child,
though the war has been teaching him
to look older than he is.
His knees are drawn beneath him,
his clothes hanging loosely
from a body that has forgotten
what fullness feels like.
Dust has settled into the creases of his skin,
and there is something tired in his face
that no child should have to carry.
Yet his eyes,
his eyes still search the horizon
as though somewhere beyond the smoke
the evening might remain untouched.
His fingers tremble.
His limbs are frail nonetheless.
And still, when the sun begins to sink,
there is the faintest suggestion of a smile.
We would take a plea
just to see another soul's world
brightened by that smile.
We would look behind the dreams
deeply tucked away,
behind invalidity,
behind uncertainty,
behind the things that might appear
a bar too high.
But so is mine.
So is this poem itself.
Because I do not have a missile
between me and tomorrow's sunset,
you had to believe.
I can speak of tomorrow
as though tomorrow were promised.
He cannot.
For his tomorrow may arrive
with a siren,
with a crater,
with a roof falling inward,
with the sudden orange of fire
where the sunset was supposed to be.
And perhaps that is where empathy begins,
in understanding the distance
between my sunset
and his.
For this is the darkest darkness of humanity:
not merely that people are made to suffer,
but that they can suffer for so long
that the world grows accustomed to it.
People enter war carrying names,
dreams, laughter, tenderness,
and sometimes come out less human,
not because humanity was absent in them,
but because violence demanded
that they bury it to survive.
And those who are ignored
begin to disappear twice:
first from the world,
then from the imagination of those
who never had to see them.
Left upon the realization
that among all the grains of sand,
none could be human enough
to block the pain.
Forgive me.
Forgive me for thinking
that I could cheer from the side
with the empathy you so praise yourself for having.
Without an interview.
Without a statistic.
Without a number
to make the suffering believable.
To feel with earnestness,
to feel the fuzzy warmth
of sunset orange
falling across the sand
and across the face of a child.
For sand and man are alike
beneath the same dying light.
Both are touched by the sunset.
Both are forgotten by morning.
But empathy,
empathy is where
one becomes apart.
We treat is as if it were a gift,
Not a certainty,
It is where I look at him
and refuse to let him
become only a statistic.
It is where his pain
crosses the distance between us
and becomes, for a moment,
something I cannot look away from.