Blog Archives

That Thing, by Eric Smith

24/6/2016

That thing
Between women and men
Half each combined that makes us one
From where does it come?

Are we stamped out
And sent upon the world?
Or do we grow into our differences?
Into our opposites?

Or some day might we awake
With new self-identification
Pulsing new desires to course
Throughout our veins

Stare in the mirror
Scuff about the streets
In the others' clothes
Speaking when spoken to

Polar forces drag us
Where they will
The why unknown
No, not unknown

The wherefore stares you
In the face
And you in the other’s
Without doubt

In The Paris Catacombs, by Ian Fletcher

14/6/2016

C'est ici l'empire de la Mort
the sign reads as I descend into
these tunnels whose walls
are stacks of skulls and bones.

Six million Parisians exhumed
in the eighteenth century
generation upon generation
from overflowing cemeteries.

Good or evil, male or female,
aristocrat or artisan, everyone
in this underworld has obtained
an undignified égalité.

I could laugh myself to scorn
at this human scrapyard
this dump of old bones
with not a ghost in sight!

Back in the land of the living,
I emerge into the rush hour,
the busy throngs of stick people
all with the same destination.

A Man And His Wife, by Pat St Pierre

8/6/2016

His dark-skinned wife of a few years
is dragged out of the room by her daughter.
The old man screams
"Don't take my wife away."
His petite wife turns and looks -
fear in her eyes.
The woman’s daughter takes her
mother’s hand.

The white skinned man sits on the sofa,
buries his head in his hands.
His wife is going to a nursing home.
Within a few short days,
his wife passes on.

At that precise moment,
the old man feels a stabbing pain
in his chest.
He falls forward knowing in his heart
that love is color blind.

That Thing, by Eric Smith

In The Paris Catacombs, by Ian Fletcher

A Man And His Wife, by Pat St Pierre

Poetry

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