Windward Review Volume 19 (2021): Empathy and Entropy

Busted Ear Drum
My eardrum is the eardrum of the nation—
busted open, ruined, and eroded
from an infection made of apathy
anger, or grief that we can’t exorcise
from the body. Mold has settled in.
The air is humid from the standing water
of what we leave unsaid, unheard, undone.
One January morning, pressure built,
rupturing the fragile peace of skin.
It hasn’t healed—not even a scab.
It’s an open wound I tend to every
morning, noon, and night, worry
over, trying to forget about.
I can’t hear the music of the world
anymore, its song of suffering.
Instead, I hear the ringing of tinnitus.
And at first, it felt disorienting—
the muffled soundscape of a world so loud
with grieving mothers shrieking Aleppo
from grief and hunger, shrieking in Reynosa
in the wake of gunshots, shrieking in Port Arthur
as policemen shoot into the night.
But now, that distant humming in my ear,
that almost silence is a sort of comfort.
I can fix it, miss, the surgeon says,
as he pencils in my surgery
where he’ll open up my skull and force
me to hear again this loud, loud world.
I nod, agree, because I know the sound
of change needs billions of open ears
with drums intact that beat and beat and beat
truth into the brain, wake up the heart,
to listen to the chorus of our earth.
Katherine Hoerth
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Empathy / Entropy