🔍 Stage 3 — The Editor's Choice and the Reader's Forgetting (Stanza 4)

🔍 Stage 3 — The Editor's Choice and the Reader's Forgetting (Stanza 4)

Duffy delivers her most damning stanza last. The photographer boards a plane for another assignment, carrying a hundred photographs. The editor selects "five or six" — the casual, approximate number is a deliberate choice, suggesting the selection is as arbitrary as the deaths it represents. These are printed in a Sunday supplement. Readers look at the images and feel something: "eyeballs prick / with tears". Duffy's choice of "prick" — a brief, involuntary physical sensation — is precise. This is not grief. It is the smallest possible emotional response.

And then: "they do not care". Three words placed at the end of the poem with deliberate finality. Duffy does not soften this verdict. The readers return to their ordered English world — the very world the photographer left and returned to — and the suffering in the photographs is forgotten before breakfast is finished. The poem's final argument is that Western indifference is not malicious; it is structural. The whole media system — photographer, editor, Sunday supplement — produces a chain whose final link is a reader whose guilt lasts approximately as long as a newspaper takes to read.