Lost voices
silencing them on the radio waves
and the world of the silver screen.
All these disappearing women.
They’ve already banned mixed-sex ed
and any males teaching females.
The advice is to stay in your own home
because it’s no longer safe on the street.
How will these women learn to exist
without voice, identity or presence?
Is this what they fought for?
this horror,
this collapse?
fearing
the form it will take,
scrawling
out all hope.
amidst a
mass silencing.
left to
fend for themselves.
impossible
to let them fall.
Silenced
the men, the
women, the children.
We hope our
voices are strong enough
to rise above
the chaos, the magnitude.
We read of
those fleeing, making a run,
the lost,
the homeless, the hopeless.
We sit in
empathy, unable to rise,
just reading
and watching in horror.
Feathers
no longer thinking what to do
We stop at signposts to giving,
They drop shields to brace ourselves
that doesn’t know itself is true.
speak of legends lest they breathe again,
a wheel calling fortune round the curve.
On the poetry day course I did a week ago, one of the exercises was to compose a found poem. This was by cutting random lines out of a magazine and assembling them into a poem. You get some really abstract results. Here’s one.
That summer (a found poem)
I was born the summer she died,
but couldn’t leave the country,
could only be temporary.
Father was one of the last of that generation,
doubling and quadrupling,
but it wasn’t fun any more.
You wanted to drop the glam,
to make a record everyone hated.
We could experiment,
wrote brilliantly together
to create something new,
suffer for good art,
a pretty good second bite.
He was like a bad luck charm,
looks back at a rollercoaster
Street Poetry album.
Brighton lines
beneath Brighton Pier in words,
moonlight reflected in the waves
waking the edge of the beach.
She walks purposefully drawn,
her focus on the moistened sand,
boots sinking, white seagulls silent,
sunlight long wrestled away.
My uncle, Billy Johnstone, will be playing our songs at the Wild on the Wall festival this weekend. You can catch him on the Acoustic stage at 6.30pm on Saturday.
Here is the link for more details: www.facebook.com/wildonthewall
Check out Billy, his music and our songs on my blog here: vickiejohnstone.blogspot.com/p/billy-johnstone-music.html
Cheers :)
Breakwater
how it rises, the crescendo,
reckon on this even distanced beat,
the remembrance, the recall
of something other loosening time,
dizzy in the make believe below,
the rush and the hush dispersing,
the ebb and flow of truth.
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On the poetry day course I did on Saturday, one of the
exercises was to compose a found poem. This was by cutting random lines out of a magazine and assembling them into a
poem. You get some really abstract results. Here’s one I did today.
The clue’s in the name.
All of a sudden I’m back to normal
after Marilyn Monroe died.
I wasn’t as out of it,
narrow-minded and intolerant.
It was so powerful, almost punk,
wallowing in my misery.
Summers in the countryside –
really creative, chopping wood.
He’s walking now,
just a pretty face,
the real deal.
A star
the beginning of a shimmer,
a phantom thing almost.
We are not here to scold
or pull the vision apart.
Silver dust is the glue between.
It holds while the whole rocks,
configured in motion to weave
strips of matter from nothing,
to add sparkle where all was bare.
