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This is a time of video game wars,
the paradox of everything feeling both
very close and very far away,
real and surreal,
all at once:
Death, for instance,
which for most of us
feels very far away,
now arrives from the sky
like a meteor on fire
and images at light speed
in your pocket;
And if you look closely
at the pixelated bits
shadows appear where
people used to be,
and you can see
the dreams of children
leaving their bodies.
The dangers of video games? This isn't something we have discussed in the past as far as I can recall. Is part of the message of the poem that death gets minimalized and trivialized by video games, action movies, the nightly news? The poem is a nice mix of real and surreal. It appears to be focused on the video game for most of the poem, but the last line about "the dreams of children" seems to bring us crashing back to reality.
ReplyDeleteleaving their bodies.
Wasn’t thinking this poem was about video games at all. More about war. And what watching violence through a screen, the closeness and simultaneous distance, desensitizes us to the real cost in lives and futures.
DeleteIronically, I got interrupted on my last comment by a siren (speaking of "death ... [arriving] from the sky like a meteor on fire")! What I was trying to say was that the last line -- like the last line of a haiku -- comes as a surprise -- taking us abruptly out of the world of video games and into the real world, where "the dreams of children/leaving their bodies" could mean death -- like real death -- or it could mean the loss of their imaginations (from too much exposure to the video games) -- or maybe that the video games have entered their dreams, drenched their consciousness, so that they have become de-sensitized to death.
ReplyDeleteThat last line surprised me too. I wasn’t sure where it came from - like a meteor on fire - and after a bit of consideration figured it should be kept. Surprise in this case is good I think. I think all your interpretations make sense!
DeleteI guess I took the first line of the poem literally! And I read phrases like "pixelated bits" and "images at light speed in your pocket" as reinforcing the video game motif. But re-reading the poem as a commentary on the "televising" of war makes sense, and is very good!
ReplyDeleteThat first line is as much a description of video games like Call of Duty as it is about the way war is actually fought these days (drones, ballistic missiles etc.) througfh the screen, as we see online.
Delete