Digits and digital screenshots sum up a decade’s material history

Figures summarize lives’ trajectories and mass movements

A matter-of-factly tale of the wide-world, or of a chip of it

Axes drawn, with zigzag lines dancing across the cartesian

Fine definition of boom and bust

Of the struggle to become, the becoming, and the loss of being

My place is a forecaster’s: I tell of unemployment rates and poverty lines and deficits

Cheery new homeowners’ smiles and jubilant shareholders’ faces I barely count

Neither do I the tearful small business owner’s wails over irredeemable loss

The once self-sufficient, now paupered, set back by the invisible hand’s mercilessness

Theories trump themes in the world of unfeeling averages and projections

Now and then the numbers come alive as I remember that I count people

Only a lucky spark; I soon become statistical again

It would seem to me that man feels pain only to an extent

When his memory of another’s brims up, he sinks it into the subconscious

To bear human hopes shattered, he creates an outlook of fateism

He separates fact from emotion

He forgets to feel, just to feel relief again

But is it not the insensitive that wreaks the most havoc upon human flesh and heart?

Our God, though great unto infinity, is closest

His heart beats, His heart feels, He sees farthest

He needs not aggregate and simplify to understand

All of history is to Him the present moment

All of one loner’s concern, a legendary significance

When the cycle of plenty and little turns and churns out beauty and pain

His arms are always outstretched to hold up the triumphant and the losing alike

In the end, all the world’s fancy and riches fade and rust

But God’s loving gaze never strays from our affairs.