Tug Dumbly - How Many the Dead?

How Many the Dead?

Quantify them, like numbers matter.

The more pneumatic the better.

Or the worse.

Or at least the more impressively bankable.    

Think big and give the sad whistle 

a death camp train: six million!   

Numbers matter. Until they don’t.

Lear’s bitch daughters to the king:

what need you 100 knights?

what need you 50?

What need 25?

What 1?

Armenia, Nanking, still whoppers.     

Though Dresden’s quarter million

has simmered down to 25,000.

Does it cool the enormity?

Who’s telling the story here?

Whose interests served?

Police estimates of demonstration numbers

versus protester figures. Such disparity.

Xerxes Persian army half a million!

But beware of Greeks bearing grifts.

We wishful thinkers, we liars to a cause.

How many saw your band / exhibition / play …?

Yeah, right! 

How many in the blitzed town?

How many taken by the wave?

(‘no Australians are believed hurt …’).

Body counts read like pedometers.

Mall shooters try and outskeet each other

in competitive massacres, atrocity tallies,

crack new records in school / office / disco turkey spree.

How many gone in the Roman arena, in Pompeii?

The lotto winning corpse counts of Stalin and Mao?

These tallies, these trembling figures,                        

these rubbery dead. It matters 

until it stops mattering.  

After the first few dozen you scoop them out  

like slurry, weigh them by the pound.