Levertov's speaker confronts an uncomfortable truth: after caring so hard about one war, she has no feeling left for the next catastrophe. The repeated word "Biafra" at the start sounds like someone trying to jolt herself awake. Compassion, she says, is a "small stock," and it was spent on Viet Nam. Now photographs of dying children barely register, and the news becomes a "dull accumulation" of statistics. She compares this numbness to poisoning and describes herself and her readers as "the deads," with no room left for love.
The second section shifts from numbness to a kind of shame. She hammers the word against her chest, trying to take in more, yet her attention slips to a television broadcast of a political nomination. Then one photograph, a boy "sitting down to die," cuts through. The ending is bleak: she knows what to do, and it is "nothing." The mood is guilty, exhausted, and quietly furious, aimed at herself as much as anyone.