Painting tragedy with numbers

Although words such as "massacre" and "victim" and "buried" help us to understand the effects of disaster and injustice, sometimes the most vivid descriptions of horrific events are painted with numbers -- 6 million slain, 4-year-old girl raped, 11 days without food.   One of the strong poetic voices of the twentieth century was June Jordan (1936-2002).  Works in her collection, Kissing God Goodbye  (Anchor Books, 1997), speak out for all victims, in Baghdad or Belfast, in Lebanon or Algeria.  In the following poem from that 1997 collection, Jordan uses numbers to heighten her portrayal of tragedy in Bosnia. 

     Bosnia Bosnia        by June Jordan

     Too bad
     there is no oil
     between her legs

     the 4-year-old Muslim girl and
     her 5-year-old sister
     and the 16-year-old babysitter
     and the 20-year-old-mother of that 4-year-old / that
     Muslim child gang raped
     from dawn to dark to time become damnation
     Too bad
     there is no oil
     between her legs
     Too bad there is no oil
     between Sbrenica and Sarajevo
     and in-between the standing of a life
     and genocide

     Too bad
     there is no oil

     Too bad
     there is no oil
     between her legs

     the woman in Somalia
     who weighs 45 pounds and
     who has buried village elders and
     who has buried village children
     who weighed even less
     than she weights after so many days
     of hunger gaping open
     to the flies

     Too bad
     there is no oil
     in South Central L. A.
     and in between the beaten men and beatup women
     and in between the African and Asian throwaways
     and in between the Spanish and the English speaking
     homeless
     and in between the dealers and the drugged
     and in between the people and criminal police
     too bad
     there is no oil

     Too bad
     there is no oil
     between her legs
     that four-year-old Muslim girl

     Too bad
     there is no oil
     between her legs

More work by June Jordan can be found at the Poetry Foundation website -- there we also find a host of  poems and other resource materials for celebration of Black History Month.   A Jordan poem that I particularly enjoy is "Problems of Translation:  Problems of Language."