The morning news reports another massacre,  
Australia’s first (or so they say). Port Arthur:
stones that might have housed
a monastery at prayer had they not
been packed for retribution, and so
ready for the man, the semi-automatic scene,
the thirty-five who died considering the violence of the past.
“Australia’s Greatest Massacre”, they say, as if size mattered,
as if the man who soaks a boy, a six-year-old, in petrol,
then takes a lighted match and touches him,
has somehow made a smaller madness.

After this the news is of Zaire: civil war and famine
fierce enough to turn stomachs into dust and wire.
The cameras grab enough to keep ‘emergency’ alive:
packs of food are raining down like hope,   
an old woman stealing flour from a teenage boy
is being beaten till she gives it back, he has a votive leaf
of blood clinging to his lip, another woman crawls
after powdered milk while, strapped across her back,
her baby looks the world straight in the eye.
In the south of France the press interview
the President. He hasn’t quite decided yet
if he’ll permit the charities to help, but he has
a gold chain around his wrist and a seaside smile.

Pathfinder, meanwhile, has been launched to see
if ever there was life on Mars. The probe will land
a rover, sixty centimetres long, to move
across the planet’s surface, sampling soil. A scientist explains
he’s long believed that life, intelligent life,
is not confined to earth. Bluthorpe isn’t sure
about that word ‘intelligent’. He sometimes thinks
Mars could be the planet humans wrecked before
moving on to earth, and now wonders if that is why
the red planet, as it watches them approach,
is as patient as a landmine in a Cambodian field.