The poem is pretty simple, it repeats the opening 'You don't know' with each line. There are several points of view at work, such as the people of Boston inside their homes: 'you don’t know how claustrophobic your house is until you can’t leave it'. To an imagining of Dzhokhar himself: 'you don’t know how precious your iphone battery time was until you’re hiding in the bottom of the boat'.
Criticisms of the poem have ranged from the interesting, such as one early poster on her blog, who said:
I understand that you are trying to acknowledge his humanity, but you aren't really succeeding in that if you are inventing his feelings to fit what you see of the situation.Whereas commentators on various news sites have said some very constructive things, such as: 'she's the WORST' and other such phrases. What has struck me though, and this is something that Amanda Palmer pointed out herself on Twitter, was that the backlash has been in response to a poem. When was the last time a poem caused such a stir? Palmer could have chosen numerous mediums to express her feelings, but she chose poetry.
Why does poetry lend itself so well to speaking about tragedy? Perhaps it's the freedom of form (or freedom to create form) that allow fragments of experience to express something meaningfully. From someone who might be a cop who 'let that guy go without shooting him dead and stuffing him in some bushes between cambridge and watertown' to the bomber who does not 'know how to mourn your dead brother'. Poetry really does let the writer get away with more than if they were writing an essay or singing a song. I suspect that because of the way poetry functions it is easy for detractors to dismiss it as just a jumble of phrases and even to be labelled as 'not really poetry', or maybe just 'shit poetry'. Yet, it still remains a poem.
Since this episode began to unravel on my Twitter feed, one word that has been used a lot is 'empathy'. In a situation such as the Bostom bombings, with the inevitable obsession as to who did it and why, empathy is very easily obscured in the pathological search for The Truth. We get this in the media, with its virtual updates streaming information to us, who are desperately hungry to know something about what is going on. The moment I heard about the bombings, I had the exact same response.
However, it's different now, because the bombers have been named, their faces broadcast to the world, and they have been hunted and killed or captured. How are we supposed to feel about this? Are we supposed to be happy? I don't feel particularly happy. There are still hundreds of people hurt, three innocent people dead as well as the two guilty ones, nothing can change that. We just know that some kind of justice has been done according to some plan or design as to what justice is.
I think this is why we need empathy, because it's our only human connection to what has happened. It is easy to hate Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev because of our empathy towards the thousands of people in Boston who will forever be scarred by the bombings. Yet, that same empathy may just also stretch to remembering that they were people too. There are poems written about The Holocaust that depict the Nazis in the camps going back to their wives and children with love. Such expressions do not lessen the horror of the camps and the evil of the people who sent so many to their deaths. Instead, they serve to remind us something that reaches far further into us than a dichotomy of good and evil: that evil has a human face, and it is the same as that of a good man or woman.
