is real.
My smile was a pink balloon
floated above me. I sang.
A big bang.
Blood on the balloon.
I find metal nuts and bolts.
I can’t sing. It isn’t real.
Nothing (for Manchester) by Paul Brookes
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Daily Archives: May 23, 2017
Birdsong by Barry Fentiman Hall
There is only one way
To get through this
Forest of bombs
And official disbelief
We must be like the
Birdsong unceasing
That scores the new day
Because sparrows
Do not understand
How much this hurts
Their day goes on
As must people
With heavy tread
Beating with lead
Glass crunching
With every step
We put one foot
In front of the other
Until we reach
The other side
Warmly embracing
The new day dawned
And joined we shall
Do it again tomorrow
Dark Tide Rising by Sophia Argyris
We didn’t see the World War,
our parents born as its hand lost grip
temporarily exhausted by so many salutes.
It’s easy to forget.
But we can see the evidence
across Europe, her cities still scarred
her walls still marked by bullets.
It’s easy to imagine.
Now war lifts its hand again
a shadow above us gaining strength,
growing in people’s anger and fear,
their desire for stronger borders.
It breathes rhetoric and propaganda
swells with nationalistic cries,
the voices of the tabloids.
Is it so easy to ignore?
We forgot, and now
we are the dark tide.
..
Sophia Argyris is a poet and yoga teacher. Born in Belgium, she has lived Brussels and the North of Scotland, and is currently based in Oxford. Her collection ‘How Do the Parakeets Stay Green?’ was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2014.
The Blast by Des Mannay
(written on the 10th anniversary of the 7/7 bombings)
If you hadn’t made me late that morning
I would have caught the train on time
But you were just a small child in need of comfort
And I, just a parent who couldn’t resist a hug
So anyway, I caught the later train.
To get to the conference – 5 days of hard politics and soft hearts
And that journey known to all –
Bristol Parkway, Swindon, Didcot, Reading and London Paddington
From there I would travel onto Kings Cross or Euston
It wasn’t until way past Swindon, we knew something was wrong
The first one to crack was the driver
In a garbled message he said he couldn’t go on
Journey would end at the next station
And we heard him sob like a small child over the Tannoy
The news spread along each carriage – there’s something wrong…
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. evil it was, evil it is by Sonja Benskin Mesher
did you dream of evil last night, for evil it was.
pocked, bleeding and dead. back broken.
this morning the garden is damp, a mole died
peaceably.
plans for a new path are growing, yet there was
evil.
again.
last night.
May 2017 by Sarah L Dixon
After the Tory Manifesto
there seems to be
a shift to hope.
After the gutter fall
from a fragile, but human hope
on the last two votes.
Belief in people and democracy
was broken into so many pieces
some gave up on rebuilding it.
Many are still staring
at the pieces
unsure where to begin.
This time,
we need a more cautious hope
of reaching for the top of walls.
And a shift from despair to lift us
on theatre wires to fly
when these results come in.
reubenwoolley 