Feeling vs Seeing

Thanks to Karl Weyrach of EZAAAP for this. I finding the epigraph especially interesting:

NEAR RUSOMO (Out-Loud Read Time 40 Sec.)
— “A.P. Wire Photo, The New York Times, 12/21/97

People say they have to express their emotions.
I'm sick of that. Photography doesn't teach you
to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see. — Bernice Abbott


They're downstream now,
beyond the falls,
eight or ten, or more,
out of the turbulence.
The Kagera River churns
onward into Tanzania, leaving
them behind in the backwash.
The smooth stone outcropping
of their native land hovers
over them like a mother seal.
They huddle against her
black flanks the way they leaned
into one another last week
in the Church for safety
in numbers. And now
that the machetes have passed,
the torsos are looking down
into the debris-choked shallows
for their missing heads and limbs.

from "Ripe" author's copyright