The Looking Glass

A poem about reading and not reading the news.

My country is nowhere I am not looking.

Within view, it is mostly empty. My attention to it barely registers what’s there, and what is there is all I can digest in one sitting.

My country is beautiful, so far as I see. Its people are good, mostly; its animals disproportionately large, centered in the fish-eye lens wherever my vision falls.

Outside of that, I imagine things are worse. The country is hard and cluttered, and it piles in from the periphery. The fish-eye lens flips, so all the action falls into the center and disappears.

We are each of us astride that lens, looking with one eye through both sides.

(Images generated by Google Gemini to prompts approximating the views above)