GRENFELL ALBUM

Tags

poem, poetry

GRENFELL ALBUM

I scroll through your names
read each snapshot of your lives

think of the human pity that
there is no mitigation, no
quiet book-closing fatalism
to let us, your readers, your
imaginers, down gently
no soft euphemism
to kill the horror
recoil from
terrible truth of fire

Oh little children, Oh lover
of song and
of dance

and saint-like altruist, hearts of
poetry, minds of philosophy
we see
now exactly the loss

it’s balance with cost
and wonder why the Universe
would be so
heartless to
Insist that price was paid.

***

Oh let us never forget this album
and what
pain and
love
learnt with every page.

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PLACES TO CHILL

PLACES TO CHILL

a homeland
for poets and artists
and people who
would walk to
walk around naked
seeing infinity and all eternity
etc etc

and cops armed with feathers
and open-air
prisons which are
just
places to chill

INFINITE SPACE

the road into Joburg is
first Diepsloot then
gated community
after gated community

each so alike, each
a fairy-tale Renaissance city
state bereft of
any sense of society

here in Mafs with stark spiked
palisades we must make do:
just two shades: moldy green
or brutal maroon

but these we need to protect each place
yet someone
living in a
yard, in a caravan

I suspect some
local Hamlet in a nutshell
with the withdrawn intellect
to think himself
a tyrant
of infinite time, and space

AND SO (HAD TO FORGO)

and so
I had to forgo
the pleasures of
Playstation
immersing myself
in Sims or
Age of Empires

all to get
this shabby poem down
and airwaved to you
(you singular and
indeed you
plural

across that shared boundary
that is neither me
nor you and
yet both us two (too)