Andrew Delapruch Poet Free verse

Moral Tension: Part Ii

with so many people around,
why wasn’t there one person trying to
stop this malicious individual who
was wailing on this woman?

while the watcher opened her mouth &
nothing came out, the man hitting the
young woman had stopped, pulling her
by the arm along behind him back into
the crowd---the woman who had been
hit was all disheveled & weeping.

the watcher didn’t know the relationship
between the two, but she knew that 
what she’d seen had sent her into a moral
panic, wherein what she knew to be
“the right thing,” she simply had been
inadequately prepared to deliver a 
response &
this kept her up at night
for the next week or so.

at home, away from the city,
the watcher didn’t walk around as
self-righteous as she had before,
in fact, it seemed to some who knew her
best,
that she had got right down off her
soapbox---
for she just couldn’t shake the memory
of that man slapping that woman so hard
that she could hear it across a crowded
street---
worse yet,
she couldn’t shake the idea that she hadn’t
done a thing to stop it.

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