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Tag: Friday poem

  • Friday poem: ‘Sabbatical’ by Yasmin Blake

    Sabbatical

     

    Quite frankly, you’d had enough.

    Britain was a dystopia.

    You’d take some time off –

    and head to Ethiopia.

     

    Not for you a life of grandkids

    watching Brave or Zootopia.

    Instead this is what you did.

    You went to Ethiopia.

     

    The Ancients once thrived there

    before we became dopier

    and dopier, and fell to despair.

    And so: Ethiopia.

     

    I’ve not seen you since.

    With the world ropier

    and ropier, it’s easy to convince

    me that your trip to Ethiopia

     

    was a necessary phase,

    designed to help me cope with a

    certain pervasive malaise.

    Will you be back from Ethiopia?

     

    They say they need you at the office.

    They say that they hope you are

    alive, and in one piece.

    We want him back, Ethiopia!

     

    Yasmin Blake

  • Friday poem: Chess by Laura Murray

    Chess

     

    Sometimes, impatient just to have things happen

    I take your pawn, knowing you’ll take mine.

    How else will the game develop? We can’t skirt each other

    endlessly, and I respect how the game deprives

    us both of room. Better to get on with it:

    brotherhood doesn’t exist on this board.

    Instead, there’s hardship, competition – this medieval

    game, a form of early capitalism.

    I love the pensive bishops, the tangential rooks.

    I love the knights, their horses flailing in battle –

    but they keep jumping into the future

    where the tanks and the nuclear bombs are:

    aggression rises as it does in modern nations.

    Even today, we still experience the frail type,

    whose power is predominantly symbolic

    who can only dodder one space at a time.

    And then there is the truly regal one –

    who, suddenly, half by chance, finds supremacy –

    like the queen moving along a vector

    nobody had foreseen, and she transforms our life.

     

    — Laura Murray

     

     

  • Friday poem: Omar Sabbagh’s ‘Searching the Horizon’

    Searching The Horizon

     

    I opened my eyes and my eyes opened

    the light that helped them first to arise;

    and it was as though a window had forged another window,

    working and sculpting the light to show

    the drama of sight – how a new horizon

    glanced at me, gently, knighting me with angles,

    the emanations in a cool and slaking breeze,

    and the unmastered day ahead, like a slave still

    to each refraction of hope, each ghost

    on its way to becoming the fuller filled-out flesh

    it wants to be. Lit now, gripped by delight,

    I walk among the staple daily shadows

    and feel each one sundered below my stepping feet,

    the horizon busied now with its batch of unhurt children.

     

    Omar Sabbagh

     

  • Friday poem: ‘Plan of Attack’ by Jude A. Jung

    Plan of Attack

     

    Best in these short days, where silence is,

    and darkness lasts, to create little beginnings,

    like the rustle of the mouse in the hedges.

    Winter requires circumspection: small songs

    can give immense colour to what has none.

    Your masterpiece, that might be for spring:

    to sketch it now is better than a fast intention

    begun bleakly, which will reek of your rushing,

    and have a sort of odour of winter’s despair,

    a too rapid response to the exhaustion

    which happens when the light isn’t here.

    An auspicious day is coming soon.

    Patience, then. Stretch the canvas, don’t mark it.

    Be alert. This is the world about to undarken.

  • Friday poem: Omar Sabbagh’s ‘The Ghost’

    The Ghost

     

    In the corner of the room

    a cheap white frame; the picture inside

    shows an aged man, minted there

    with a brimming sense of achievement, calmed

    by a certain slow and quiet pride.

    My daughter kisses the picture

    now and then, scurrying to that small corner

    whenever trouble threatens.

     

    The man there has seen it all before,

    how each one of us holds his own white sky,

    letting it fold upwards into each one of his own dark eyes;

    how each one of us elides the fateful missive sent

    him, an opened secret from above or below;

    how each one of us living speaks

    in stillness to himself as though he were a ghost

    already, a spirit seeking to prick the fabric

    of the world he’s left behind,

    hoping to needle the place it was that long ago

    he’d signed with departure.

     

    And between the two,

    this framed wiseacre and my daughter,

    I see my life past each day’s silent slaughter

    turn in style between white and grey,

    framed by the two known sides of love.

     

    Omar Sabbagh