Burying the Lede - Aug 5 2023

 

Burying the Lede

Aug 5 2023

It's all bad news.

Fire, famine, flood

somewhere in the world.

I suppose I should take consolation

that it wouldn't be news

if it didn't bleed.

That most everywhere else

it's pretty much as usual;

an early commute,

the kids pouting

that there’s nothing to do,

the grousing about

the traffic, the weather

the slow internet.

But still, the bad news gets worse,

and my concern about the future

deepens.

After all, by what law of nature

should things stay the same,

disaster

always happen far away?

So I have reason to feel unsettled.

That the centre cannot hold.

That there is no safe refuge,

even here

in this privileged haven.

That the point of no return

has passed us by,

and the thin line

on which human flourishing teeters

is about to tip us off,

a bottomless fall

from a squandered Eden.

Fire, famine, flood.

The headlines scream blood,

and I can't help but hear.

A note for nitpickers.

No, not “lead”.

There are two familiar cliches that involving this word: “burying the lede”, and “if it bleeds, it leads”. I thought the first made a better title, even though the second is more appropriate to the theme of this poem.

"Burying the lede" means relegating the key paragraph of the news story — the one that best summarizes it while including the most salient details — further down the page. In the old days of hot type and inked newsprint, space was limited, and articles often had to conform to rigid word counts: so in the composing room, a story could be arbitrarily cut anywhere in the middle. So to be certain it wasn't entirely left out, the lede had to come first. If it was “buried”, it might be lost.

This is the classic ”pyramid style” of news reporting. No room for creativity or personal story-telling! Not so in the digital medium.

In Linotype printing, a “lead” was a metal divider and an earlier coinage. So using the same spelling risked confusion.