Succumbing to the succour that poetry allows
rain falls and pain empties ….
eddying always as it flows.
Arts of the Earth
Succumbing to the succour that poetry allows
rain falls and pain empties ….
eddying always as it flows.
An SOS from the frontier.
This is a message from the borderlands
an endless void a windswept land
it is a desert stripped bare of features.
So I whisper the message – If you could have heard
all that I’ve heard. If you could see all that I’ve seen
if you could have been there, far out there and if you
could have listened to peoples words, listened to those
broken hurting people and that place out there, in here,
in me, in you. The dark frontier, that secret place you know
I know, we know, we all know, but deny its existence.
But for me there is no choice. I cannot deny its imprint
on my mind, my memory is not blind, deaf or unfeeling.
But I wish sometimes that it might be so. Now what do I do
with these memories, the words I do not wish to store,
and hold like some mad treasure trove, archive of horrors
of mankind, of humankind the stories told and told again,
The faces change but the pain and fear, the words remain.
It’s unending, it’s our narrative as long as we survive
this story will evolve and grow for we are humans.
I worked amongst the desolation, fragments,
survivors, of lives that might have flowered.
And that endless unknowing of what might have been
of who would I have been if that had not been done
to me, to who I was, a child, and unsuspecting.
Imagine the innocence and the quiet trust.
And all that time of working to heal – denial.
A total blindness to the reality of the harm
being done to children everywhere you look.
It’s a reality, take a bus or a train, sit in a café
you will be close to someone who has survived.
And then the guaranteed denial that fact is fact
In the face of all that. And then that sound
of wheels within wheels grinding, the noise
of conversations and the deals in closed rooms
to keep silence, to protect the perpetrators
and prevent the door room from being opened
and the truth from being known and shared.
Forty years of denial, obstruction and frustration.
Our lives are brief, a mere fluttering in time.
So open the door wide and let the light in!
From Rob Cullen’s collection “Uncertain Times” published September 2016 Octavo Press.
Thundering and lightning crackled without warning in clear blue skies
the silenced old gods and wise men left only indentations, remembrances
Of psalms and words in the places they’d once stood in so many guises.
In the tall aspen trees above the school yard Jackdaws turned into blackness
©RobCullen2017
Love song to Sarajevo.
A love song should be sung with joy not shame
Yes a love song should be sung with joy
But it is with shame that I write
A love song to Sarajevo.
I hear of the deaths and the blood spilled
And the killing goes on and on and on
And it is with shame that I write
A love song to Garasda.
I heard a Muslim child cry
Rescued but leaving her mother behind
And it is with shame that I write
A love song to Mostar.
I heard from the quietness of our radio
A man cry for his Serb sister, lost and unheard
And it is with shame that I write
A love song to Belgrade.
A Serb speaks of his anger that the world
Has simply turned away and no longer listens
And it is with shame that I write
A love song to Tuzla.
A doctor speaks of the death of the wounded
A hospital bombed and riddled by sniper fire
And it is with shame that I write
A love song to the people.
Love songs should be sung with joy
But my heart is filled with pain.