The news story had appeared on my screen like so many others – a 10-year-old child with brain cancer, malignant cells where dreams should be, deported while her parents remained caught in the machinery of our immigration system. "She is legal. They are not." Three words. Just three. But, what terrible power they hold.

What do you do when the world gets a bit too much? You write. At least that's what I do. Poetry becomes my small act of resistance, my refusal to look away when everything in me wants to turn the channel, scroll past, pretend I didn't see. Perhaps it's futile – words against walls, metaphors against executive orders – but I'm not entirely certain I have anything else to offer.

The image of that child – separated from parents while facing a death sentence of a different kind – has been with me for days. It followed me as I walked Archie in the mornings and it followed me into dreams. It sat with me at breakfast, this ghost-child with cancer blooming where dreams should be. And all the while, the machinery of deportation moves slowly through its gears.

So this is for the little girl …

When civilisations die, it is not with thunder
but with executive orders. Empathy's slow execution,
the methodical deletion of the human face,
like watching ice caps melt through satellite feeds—
distant, inevitable, someone else's catastrophe.

We inhabited a garden once, not Eden
but something close: a space where glances carried weight,
where between stranger and stranger ran a current
like blood between chambers of the same heart.
Now we've built instead these concrete hierarchies,

these spreadsheets of existence and non-existence.
I saw yesterday the precision of our cruelty:
a child whose brain bloomed wrong, malignant cells
where dreams should be, and parents whose bodies
crossed invisible lines drawn in dust.

She is legal. They are not.
Three words that sever what should never be severed.
What terrible efficiency in our systems
that can parse a family into columns:
keep, discard, process, remove.

The end comes this way: not in fire or flood
but in the quiet death of recognition.
When Lazarus lay at the rich man's gate,
the sin was not wealth but blindness—
the practiced art of not-seeing.

Empathy dies gradually, not all at once
like revelation. It erodes like faith,
or coastlines, or names on parchment
that weather into shapes we no longer
recognize as language or as human.

Ted Peters called it a "cycle of sin"—
anxiety spiralling into unfaith into pride
into wanting what others have into justifying our wrongs
into cruelty into blasphemy.
A syntax of spiritual collapse, a grammar of empire.

Melania wore a jacket once—
"I really don't care, do you?"—
and perhaps this is how empathy ends:
not loudly, but in quiet gestures,
small cruelties stitched casually
into the fabric of our days.

"Civilizational suicidal empathy," Elon calls it,
as if compassion were a virus
eating through our systems,
as if feeling were the fatal flaw.

Empathy is Western weakness, he says,
though Christ seemed rather clear about the least of these,
about the neighbour, Samaritan or otherwise,
about the children coming unto him.

Of whom the poet Shillito spoke:
The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak;
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God's wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.

I have studied the autopsies of dead empires:
Rome, Byzantium, a hundred others.
The diagnosis is always the same—
people become data, suffering becomes statistics,
efficiency triumphs over mercy.

Look at us now: we've made an idol of the algorithm,
a theology of the bottom line. We praise
the leader who "makes hard choices,"
meaning choices hard for others,
meaning choices that require no sacrifice from those who choose.

I have no use for any god, any politics
that doesn't break itself for love,
that doesn't enter suffering the way a seed
must crack to grow. The kingdom falls
when the king can no longer feel.

History leaves this warning in the ruins:
when we no longer see the divine in the stranger's face,
when policy replaces communion,
when efficient cruelty replaces inefficient mercy,
the center cannot hold—no matter how many walls we build.

For what survives is not our systems nor our certainties,
but what we plant in the soil of our shared humanity.
Empathy: that small, persistent green
pushing through concrete designed to last
but destined to return to dust.

While borders shift and empires fall,
while we parse humanity into deserving and undeserving,
something grows—call it grace, or God,
or just the human heart suddening
itself back into being.

This is how worlds end: not with a bang
but with a memo. Not with invasion
but with indifference. Not with hatred
but with its more efficient cousin:
the calm, professional refusal to see.

ooo0ooo

Some Thoughts About the Poem

I keep returning to the face of that child. Not the actual face – the media wisely protected her identity – but the face I imagine: confused, frightened, in pain from the cancer and now from this new, incomprehensible separation. You know what I mean? That face that could be any child's face, that could be your child's face if circumstances were different, if you had been born on the wrong side of some invisible line drawn in dust.

That line about "the precision of our cruelty" came to me as I considered how meticulously we've constructed systems that can distinguish between a sick child and her caregivers. There's something almost beautiful about such precision, in the way that certain poisons can be beautiful – elegant in their destructive efficiency. We have become so good at creating systems that process human lives with the cold precision of a meat grinder. Sorry, that's a bit graphic. But this truth require graphic language.

The Spiritual Crisis Behind the Political One

When I referenced Ted Peters' "cycle of sin," I was trying to understand the spiritual mechanics behind our collective hardheartedness. How does a nation with such religious rhetoric, such public declarations of faith, arrive at policies that so clearly contradict the fundamental teachings of that faith? It's like watching someone claim to be a vegetarian while devouring a steak – the cognitive dissonance is staggering.

Over the years, I have been wrestling with many theological questions, but increasingly I find myself drawn to this most basic spiritual inquiry: How have we become so blind to each other? The reference to Melania's jacket – "I really don't care, do you?" – haunts me as the perfect encapsulation of our moment. Not active malice but casual indifference.

What We've Forgotten About Our Faith

When I wrote about Christ's clarity regarding "the least of these," I was thinking about how thoroughly we've reimagined our religious traditions to justify our hardness of heart. When Elon Musk dismisses empathy as "Western weakness," I hear the voice of empire co-opting the language of strength, forgetting the radical vulnerability at the heart of the Christian story. It makes me wonder – what book is he reading? Certainly not the one where Jesus consistently sides with the vulnerable, the outcast, the sick child.

Edward Shillito's poem about a wounded God speaks to me of a divinity that doesn't stand apart from suffering but enters it fully. "To our wounds only God's wounds can speak" – this is the theology that still makes sense to me when faced with a world of border walls and deportation orders. Not a God of power and efficiency, but a God who knows what it means to be broken for love. I'm not sure I can explain why this matters so much to me, but it does. It matters tremendously.

Finding Hope in Dark Places

I write these poems not just as lament but as resistance. When I speak of "that small, persistent green pushing through concrete," I'm reminding myself that systems of cruelty have never had the final word. Throughout history, even as empires rose and fell, as borders shifted and policies changed, something essential about our shared humanity has persisted. Like water finding its way through rock – slow, patient, unstoppable.

I think of the healthcare workers who likely cared for this child, the advocates who tried to prevent her deportation, the journalists who told her story, the readers who felt something stir within them upon learning of it. These small acts of seeing, of refusing to accept the logic of separation and categorization, are the persistent green I cling to. They're not much, I know. But they're something.

Have you ever noticed how hope shows up in the strangest places? Just when you think you're done, when you're ready to throw in the towel and admit that humanity is a lost cause, someone does something so unexpectedly kind that it stops you in your tracks. A nurse holds the hand of a dying patient. A teacher spends her own money on classroom supplies. A stranger helps a mother carry her stroller up subway stairs. And you think – maybe we're not done for after all.

I have to believe that empathy is not truly facing extinction but is instead being reborn in unexpected places, among people who choose to see differently. That even as some hearts are hardening, others are "suddening themselves back into being" – awakening to our profound interconnectedness. It's a weird phrase, I know – "suddening themselves back into being." But sometimes regular language just doesn't cut it.

Each time we choose to truly see another person – especially those our systems have deemed disposable or deportable – we participate in a quiet revolution. We refuse the empire's invitation to blindness. We choose, instead, the vulnerable, inefficient path of love. It's not much. It won't make headlines. But it's what we've got.

And perhaps this poem is my small contribution to that revolution – my way of saying to that child, and to all who suffer under the weight of algorithmic systems: I see you. And to those who implement such systems: I see what you're doing. And to myself and my readers: We must not look away. Not now. Not ever.