Google it
The diminishing drought drains
knowledge at my finger’s tip;
I once cherished the unpredictable rains,
held out my tongue to catch each drip,
wondered at the taste.
I can feel those flavours slip
past parched roots in streams of waste;
They leach into polluted pools,
rotten reservoirs on tap to haste,
and fill the brains of fools.
Vaccines (or what happens without them)
The drizzle sits as bleakly suspended mist
on a backdrop of grim skies and damp, grey stones
where forgotten names begin to erode;
memories reduced to blank slate and rust.
The howling wind echoes the wailing ghosts
of mothers who mournfully trace each etched word
and sorrowfully watch as the wretched world
so quickly forgets the many children lost:
consumed and taken, snatched in a fleeting youth,
so commonly before what now is so rare.
To succumb, after all that, so unfair
to the victim who deserved, merely, the truth.
Praying for a cure
In the tumult of a rain-lashed moor
a mother bleats her confused woe
in grief over a lifeless corpse,
gaunt with eyes hollowed out by crows.
Dead against the fast-shut door,
her wails consumed by thunder claps
whisper through long-rotten cracks
phantasmally along the floor
to land a chilling shiver
on the shoulders of a mother, poor,
who cradles her ailing litter
praying to God for something more.
