A time will come in your life when you too will feel like a prisoner. It may be love keeping you boxed in or hate sucking out the air around you. It may be illness clipping your wings, or simply the weight of years … no matter.

Bach cantatas…
unpicking stitches from
the kneeler

Stella Pierides

The Luitpold Bridge in Munich is closed. Climate activists have glued themselves to the road disrupting traffic. They are not afraid of a jail sentence, they say. Part of me yearns to be there with them. Making statements, taking action. Instead, I follow signs for an alternative route, like so many ahead of me, and so many behind. Our long, slow-moving queue snakes around our principles.

on the radio…
instructions for instant
gratification

Stella Pierides

Martin was sitting in an ante-room waiting to be called for interview for summer work with the rail and road transport system in Ireland. It was easy to get temporary work there.
– Come in, groaned a voice from the interview room.
Martin went in. A lowly official was putting his socks back on, having cut his toe nails.
– So you’re looking for summer work?
– Yes, I’m in my third year in college.
– Third year. How many years have you to do?
– Four.
– Four? And what are you studying?
– English, Philosophy and Psychology.
– I don’t know what kind of a job you’ll get out of that?
Neither did Martin.

tea bags
stuck to the ceiling
like bats

Gerry McDonnell

No one immune. Floods. Wildfires. So what would she do  if …? Motheaten teddy bear? Priceless vase? She glances again at the middle distance. Light to carry. Something she will always take with her.

flat concrete surface
of the disused office block
gulls in the sunrise

Note: title taken from Shakespeare’s sonnet 10

.
Diana Webb

Democracy is dying.  The sky is not falling. Democracy, I said, is falling. Does anyone remember civics? The rights and duties of citizens? Do you know your rights? Your duties? This is a form of torture. Death by a thousand turned heads. Turned downward as if in mourning but no, not sorrow. Oblivion. Most folks are on their phones while Democracy is dying. Calling out to be saved. But we were taught not to answer calls we don’t recognize. Democracy. The freedoms we call our own. Individualism. Does any of this ring a bell? Hello? Time is running out. Democracy is dying and all we do is watch? Remember, it is the poet, the artist and the intellectual who are among the first to be rounded up under authoritarian regimes?

after killing it
the skin wings
of a bat

Peter Newton