My daughter calls out
By Olivia Gwyn
“Dada!” for the first time through the phone
and her dad is only sixteen minutes away
on his way home when she says it
It’s not until we are laying in bed
at the end of the night that he tells me
he’s never in his life wanted to invent teleportation so bad
I lay in bed and think of every dad
FaceTiming their daughter in a different country
Another lonely night in a lonely room
at the end of a lonely week with no end in sight
except an envelope of cash to send home
Food in their bellies and a frown on their face
at the end of the day, calling “Papa! Papa!”
and he is still gone
We sit comfortable in our comfortable homes, talking
about how we would move heaven and earth for our kids
and scoff, berate and condemn any who would dare try
They put us to shame as
we watch them on sinking boats,
are we blind?
Our minds a blank page, void of any capacity
for imagination or truth that we see a woman
carry her son onto a boat that we know now will sink
And cannot fathom that there were knowable, terrible things
that led her to take a thousand steps to get there?
We sit on our couches, with the A/C and monitors on,
and stare at our phones with glazed eyes, scorning
at their otherness, which has been carefully contrived
By cowards who tell you they should’ve stayed—
as if they weren’t people, humans, moms and dads
who agonized over every decision or alternative
And would give anything, everything
for the hope of having an option,
something better than watching their kids die
And you should be grateful for how little you know
and completely ashamed for how little you care
and how shamelessly you have not even tried
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