Saturday 19 December 2020

Google it

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.




Friday 18 December 2020

Vaccines (or what happens without them)

 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 - the world before vaccines

 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.