Small boys sell silver bullets
at the road side, for emergency
use only. In the Land of the Free
clockwork sheep graze sleepless fields.
Do they dream of a lambing
snow tumbling from neon skies?
Do they recall punch-drunk
poppies beyond the electric fence?
The mocking bird twitters
from his gilded tower. Syncopated
rhythms pump black gold. Blood
moons rise. Hunters summon the blue
-eyed to the door. She drives north
as a skein of geese flies the other way.
She drifted down Main Street,
shrunken and exposed
to the gaze of lacy twitchers.
She maintained a regal air,
head high, Liberty scarf fluttering.
Think panache, she thought.
Her expression was composed,
eyes cool as anthracite
and mouth dead as diamanté.
But sunbeams melted her frozen
cockles, dissolved her moody blues.
So why the tremor in her guts?
When she reached the Post Office
her feet puddled like jellyfish
and she slumped against the wall.
Her reflection in the window
was pale as January. Her face
had slipped to her waist.
With failing heart she understood.
The next day all that remained
was a dark stain and a scrap of Liberty.
“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
Leonard Cohen, Anthem
And here’s the legendary voice of Cohen:-
Naked before the mirror, her limbs bent in wilful
directions. She was a misshapen tree, bent
by a bomb blast in some forgotten war, misshapen
but surviving in the ruins of a bombed out town
in a ruined land with a name impossible to spell.
Like the victim of a witch’s spell one leg pointed
left, the other pointed right pulling her opposite
ways. Her life was a circle, a gravitational pull
to wayward rotation. Men caught by her centrifugal
spin queued in rotation to see her flicker matchstick
shadows on the bedroom ceiling, flickering
like the wings of a bird in a locked room.
Father sings Russian lullabies as he drives
the coast road, the island like crushed glass.
We pass beneath the kissing trees.
One, two, three, four, here comes bunny for a run.
Five, six, seven, eight, here comes farmer with his gun.
Ready now, nine and ten…
I watch funny bunny burn in the living
room stove. Ember eyes shine and fade.
Synthetic fur shrivels as flames swallow
my beloved black and hollow.
My fist clenches a secret lock and I crunch
Frosties from a Beatrix Potter bowl.
If only Eve could don a straw hat and vanish to the Isle of Paros!
Instead, she was trapped in the Garden, weaving hard lines
of blood as the beginning people judged her pink lady tears.
Where was her power over water? Lilith dried out in the desert.
They shall possess her forever and dwell there
from generation to generation.
As the mushroom cloud rose over the maroon lagoon
Eve wondered if it was, in fact, a good time for a trip.
She was wearing her lucky pearls and the new horizon
walking boots, birthday gifts from the ferryman.
It is He who casts the lot for them,
And with His hands He marks off their shares of her.
Sad to see swine die but she was really more of a snake person.
So she turned her last page with the left hand
of darkness and prepared to recycle her perfect skin,
gala smooth and hoping for first prize. Ka-Ching!
“Friendship is delicate as a glass, once broken it can be fixed but there will always be cracks”.
Waqar Ahmed
