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.