Poetry

AFP photo

By

Lynn White

Running On Empty

We take care how we fill our shoes.

Our trainers and boots.

Our flats and heels, stilettos and cuban.

They may match our mood, specially chosen,

or be eternal representations of our unified self.

So surely something of us must remain

when they are emptied.

Not just our smells and mis-shapes,

evocative as they are,

but something more fundamental.

Something spiritual.

Something symbolic.

See here

empty shoes

laid out tidily in rows.

Blocked together on a grass field

or concrete yard.

Rows upon rows of them

that once contained the school children

now shot dead,

our children.

See here

empty shoes

piled high in untidy heaps.

Heaps and heaps of them,

that once contained peaceful people

now massacred, bombed, burned.

Our people

spanning place

and time without end.

Once Upon A Time

Once upon a time

they used to line the streets

with the heads of the enemy on pikes.

The heads rotted away in time

leaving only the pikes

standing empty.

Now

there is too little left,

too little remains to separate

the head from the body of the defeated

remnants in the rubble of the city.

Too little left.

So they take the helmets

and set them on pikes.

This time

the pikes will

rot away

first.

But there

is no one

left to see.

Lynn White

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. Her poem ‘A Rose For Gaza’ was shortlisted for the Theatre Cloud ‘War Poetry for Today’ competition 2014. This and many other poems have been widely published, in recent anthologies such as – ‘Alice In Wonderland’ by Silver Birch Press, ‘The Border Crossed Us’ from Vagabond Press and ‘Selfhood’ from Trancendence Zero – and journals such as Apogee, Firewords Quarterly, Indie Soleil, Midnight Circus and Snapdragon as well as many other online and print publications.

Find Lynn at: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lynn-White-Poetry/1603675983213077?fref=ts and lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com