Real poppies don’t burn

Teenager arrested for posting burning poppy picture on Facebook

The Guardian, 12 November 2012

Because real poppies don't burn

fetch me a plastic and paper one

and a match, and together we can inflame

some indignation, strike out for freedom

of speech. For kindling we can use

old images of the Princess of Wales

and the stalwart Winston Churchill,

torn up, twisted, sweetly combustible.

For good measure hurl on some holy books

and anything wooden resembling a cross,

and flags—flags make good fuel too—

crosses, stars or stripes would do

just fine, and anything emblazoned

with a dragon is begging to get burned.

Toss on that poppy of blood red paper,

douse with gin and apply a lit taper

low down for a slow burn and added offence.

Observe for one minute it kindle in silence.

And because no one troubles

to censor or censure a poet, from the ashes

an inextinguishable image will rise

of the puerile act of burning poppies.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The sole survivor

Over 200 feared dead in Syrian attack

The Guardian, 13 July 2012

They picked him out

from a gut-spattered nook

among the leftovers

of a brother and two sisters,

no crib for the living there,

they said,

no rest for the extant.

The commanders taking stock

dust him off, pat him down

and force him to stand

for hours, his charred fingers

knotted behind his head,

keeping him from clearing

the bile from his mouth

or the past from his eyes.

They mistake his tear-tracks

for a traitor’s fears,

beat from him names, times

and places, credible details

of cowardice and treason.

At the pocked wall

they offer him a cigarette

which he declines

out of a habit of surviving.

(c) Slush Poet

Homs

A veto against the Syrian people

Al-Arabiya News, 8 February 2012

Do not blame

China and Russia

for the carnage their veto

commands:

the spinning bottle

knows no magnetic north.

When the rain in Spain

was bombs

and Britain stared down

the bottle’s throat

we too chose to sit around

on our hands.

Do not honour the fallen

or their sacrifice;

it’s happening over again

in Homs.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

A Piece of America

Branson tells MPs to end the war on drugs

METRO, 25 January 2011

Hanging over the gate
like the green Virginia staked
up in the curing barn
daydreams weaving with the creaking corn;

their coming thundered out
of the ground as if the beets
were straining to meet them
in battle, and stalks of corn
clacked out a warning
long before they were sundered.

We’d known they were coming,
hunkering down with neighbors watching
smoke rise over the horizon,
columns like scores on a gatepost
marking off the days, we knew
Nicaraguan soldiers were coming to raze
our cash crops to the ground.

What have we done to them?
What have we done?
To them what must we have done?

They say our leaves enslave their young.
They say our leaves pay organized crime.
They say they come for God.

We’ll melt into the blue grass hills
and live like the people
who made this great land;
behind us the gate-rails splinter,
a new sun reddens our necks,
the vermin swarm in barking alien sounds.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet