Arrivals by Brian Reid

I am not a silent poet

Eyes once dark and sparkling

Now dull, opaque, unseeing

Mouths bleakly eloquent

In crushing silence

Bodies tossed on elemental tides

Settle, face down in surf

Mother and small sons locked together

In fraternal farewell

Fallen at the final gateway

To the bosom of western democracy

Families fractured

By men without pity

Pushed from a homeland

Drowning in jihad

Prey to bottom feeders

Grown fat on miserable migration

The images shock the senses

We stop to contemplate the abyss

24 hour news waits for no one and moves on

What is the collective noun for Refugees?

A swarm? A herd ? An exodus?

An ocean maybe,

Everything ends here

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Aleppo by Amit Shankar Saha

I am not a silent poet

I do not love you birch

and I have learnt to lie.

Your yellowed leaves I keep

in pages of poetry.

Between my pretensions

I ecocriticize.

And if I cry I say

I cry for Syria.

Aleppo’s children are

all dearer to me.

Their blasted past mirrors

denial of history.

On the blackboard of life

so much chalk dust we wipe.

But in the palimpsest

everything is inside.

(Hidden) In the layers

live all those who have died.

So, the fall in autumn

and the death in December,

all, all I will deny.

I will seal the ceilings,

the floorboards too and hope

there remains a crack or two.

Remember Bamian,

we were the Buddhas there,

now there the desert dwells.

Look birch, how the dust flies

in Aleppo and dies

all intertextual.

Bio: Dr. Amit Shankar Saha is a faculty member in the Department of English at Seacom Skills University…

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