A television pundit is knocked flat by the sight of "brotherly love", and the speaker's response is to go looking for sand. That odd, practical reaction is the key to the poem. The title abbreviates "mainstream media", an identification the "talking head" and the "green room" (where guests wait before going on air) confirm. The poem is a charm, a small piece of folk magic aimed at a whole industry of professional opinion. Nothing in it depends on knowing who wrote it or when, because everything it needs is on the page.
The first stanza sets up an irony. "Brotherly love / come to something" has a sarcastic ring, like the phrase "to think it's come to this." The pundit seems to be struck down not by a scandal but by harmony, which suggests someone whose living depends on conflict. The poem never says so outright, and that restraint is part of its dry humour. The grammar helps. "Was fallen dead" is old-fashioned, closer to scripture than to a newsroom, and the clash between that antique phrasing and the glossy modern setting makes the pundit look both grand and absurd. The phrase "talking head" also reduces him: he is only a head, and a head can be dropped.
The second stanza follows the body's collapse. His stomach "had a fit", as if it were a separate creature with its own opinions. Then comes a list of old-fashioned symptoms: "ready to weep", "pale and melancholy". Pale is also what a sick, greenish face looks like in a green room, so the setting and the symptoms quietly echo each other. The turn arrives with "but began to bark." Real feeling is on the verge of showing, and what comes out instead is noise. Barking is what pundits do, and it is also what dogs do, so the line lets the human slide into the animal. Even the sound changes, from the soft, liquid "pale and melancholy" to the hard consonants of "began to bark."
The third stanza gives the spell itself, and its tone is oddly gentle. "So I find sand for him" sounds like a neighbour offering a remedy, not a curse. The verb "carry" then does something clever. The sand is "to carry in his pocket", but the next line says it will "carry him down", so the burden becomes the carrier. The pocket suggests something small and easy to overlook, yet it is enough to take him "into a well". A well can mean a grave or a drowning, but it can also mean a source of clean water. An old saying puts truth at the bottom of a well, and sand is used to filter water, so the destination can be read as a punishment or a purification. The poem lets both readings stand. The title promises a spell without saying whether it blesses or curses, and the speaker's quiet helpfulness makes the ambiguity more unsettling.
The form works the same way. The poem has three unpunctuated, lowercase quatrains with short lines of about two to four stresses, and it reads like a whispered incantation. There is almost no rhyme: "head" and "dead" chime in the first two lines like a nursery chant, and then the pattern simply stops, as though the neat sound-bite has been dropped along with the pundit. The only "I" appears in the final stanza, and the speaker never shouts, argues or accuses. In its manner the poem is the opposite of a talking head. It answers a barking voice by saying less and slowly weighing it down.
That contrast is what makes the poem worth reading. It is a satire that refuses to be loud, and it uses the smallest of materials (a pocketful of sand, a few plain verbs) to imagine a silence that might be either a punishment or a mercy. A reader is left to decide which, and to notice how much of the poem's force comes from what it leaves unsaid.