Fred Pleitgen was standing on a street in Tehran this week, talking to a greengrocer and his customer. CNN sent him there, into the daily life of a country at war, and for that we should all be grateful.

I know Fred a little bit. He’s worked for CNN for 20 years. Our paths have crossed a few times around the world, and I’ve always been struck by how calm Fred is in tough situations, and by the simple fact that he’s a straight reporter.

But within hours of his arrival in Tehran—the most dangerous assignment in the world right now—the Trump administration accused him of peddling “propaganda.” Well, they should know.

All Fred was doing was listening.

That is an essential thing in wartime. What is it like for people living under the American-Israeli bombardment?

What Fred Pleitgen found was not dramatic. It was just human. Here is one of his reports:

“When there’s a bombing,” the older man told him, “everyone thinks of how much they love their life.”

The greengrocer, asked why he was out, why he had opened his stall: “We are definitely worried for our life, but we have no other choice. This is my work, and it’s about providing daily food.”

You could be anywhere. You could be anyone. The man selling vegetables, the man buying them—they have entered the permanent archive of what war does to the people who have no choice but to live inside it.

It may not seem like it, but that is great journalism. (And, yes, I realize Fred is not free to go where he wants, and the people he talked to are not free, either. But look at them, listen to them—and tell me this is mere propaganda.)

Great journalism brings us closer not to power, but to each other.

Some weeks in the news feel like a firehose. War accelerates that. Breaking news bulletins, presidential speeches, new video, all kinds of opinions—it can be overwhelming. But we know these are serious, consequential stories that raise real questions about power, accountability, and what comes next. But the challenge in our polarized county and polarized media environment is that the same events are being told in very different ways depending on where you look.

That’s why I’ve been spending time with Ground News, a site and app designed to help readers see the full picture of how the news is covered. It doesn’t tell you what to think. Instead, it’s a great way to compare news coverage across the political spectrum. What is the Right focusing on? What stories are they missing? Same thing with the Left. And Ground News’ Blindspot feature lets you see stories that are getting attention in one corner of the media but little in another. It’s fascinating—and useful.

Some of my supporters are readers like you; others are like-minded organizations that help sustain this work. Ground News is among them.

If you’d like to support independent journalism and get 40% off Ground News’ Vantage plan, you can subscribe here: www.groundnews.com/moran

The week was raucous with other voices.

There was the cheerful callousness of the President and his Defense Secretary, who waved off the deaths of more than a hundred Iranian schoolgirls in Minab—a tragedy the forensic analysts of The New York Times and The Washington Post assessed as likely the result of a mistaken U.S. strike on the school, located near an Iranian Revolutionary Guard complex.

There were all the screaming arguments about the War Powers Act, the counter-screams about Iranian terrorism, all those people who had spent years insisting America must never again fight foreign wars discovering, with impressive speed, that what they had actually meant was “unless our guy starts them.”

But the greengrocer keeps appearing to me. His shop. His morning. His particular form of courage, which is not the courage of the soldier or the martyr but of the person who gets up, unlocks the door, and does his work, because the family needs to eat and because daily life, even inside a war, is what life actually is.

I’ve seen how people go about their lives in war. A restaurant near the Nicaragua-El Salvador border in the early 1980s; laughter punctuated by gunfire. A school in Bosnia where the kids never left, because their parents had moved the family in after their village had become a battleground. Kids playing soccer in the rubble near two downed US helicopters in Mosul, Iraq. A man fishing with dynamite in the sea off Benghazi. An outdoor concert in Lviv, Ukraine, an old man listening, eyes closed. Then the sirens going off.

Let us think of the daily lives of all who are under the shadow of this latest war. They are us.

Many poets have written about the almost surreal survival of daily life within the insanity of war, about what it means that the coffee is still hot, that the birds still fly when the shelling stops, that love—stubborn, irreducible love—is precisely what ordinary people are fighting to protect and what the bombs threaten to extinguish.

Two poems, one old, one new.

The first is a famous poem written by Alan Seeger, an American poet who died in World War I at the age of 28. Seeger was fighting with the French Foreign Legion when he was killed in France in 1916, but this poem seems to me not only to be about a soldier’s relationship to death in war, but to all living with the brute fact that modern war has always killed more civilians than combatants.

The second poem this week is by the American poet Ilya Kaminsky, who was born in Odessa, now in Ukraine, then in the Soviet Union. This poem is from his remarkable collection Deaf Republic, a cycle of poems set in an imaginary Eastern European town under occupation. A soldier shoots a boy; the gunshot makes everyone deaf. And within this terrible, absurd fantasy, Kaminsky insists life…is still life.

—Terry

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedI have a rendezvous with DeathAt some disputed barricade,When Spring comes back with rustling shadeAnd apple-blossoms fill the air—I have a rendezvous with DeathWhen Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my handAnd lead me into his dark landAnd close my eyes and quench my breath—It may be I shall pass him still.I have a rendezvous with DeathOn some scarred slope of battered hill,When Spring comes round again this yearAnd the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deepPillowed in silk and scented down,Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,Where hushed awakenings are dear ...But I've a rendezvous with DeathAt midnight in some flaming town,When Spring trips north again this year,And I to my pledged word am true,I shall not fail that rendezvous.

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedDr. Alfonso Barabinsky wantsto go outsideI hold him down with my smaller body.He walks, runs from his shoes to my kitchen.He is drinking in my kitchen,He swims in my kitchen with his varicose fat legs.Alfonso, you fool. Youthink it is brave to drinkvodka all morning on an empty stomach.The walls of our apartment flash.The walls of our apartmentstand. They are bombing his hospital.He washes my face.He fingerspells the names of patients.The shadow of his fingers huge on the whitewashed wall.The walls of our apartment flash.When the bombs fallwe make children.

He kneels and kissesthrough my skinthe shape of our only child.They are bombing his office.Takes his glasses off and lays them on the table like a shining weapon.Throws his t-shirtat our cat, fat hangs over his belt.Pulls a stolen lemonout his pocket.They are bombing his hospital office,But I am a ripe womana man could be happy.