Anniversary

poem for the old year


Only one species creates
its artefacts from misery,
exquisite, often serviceable:
profit thrives on agony,
whether it be lampshades
made from human skin,
figures carved from ivory
or whalers' scrim,
fur and leather, hair and feathers
fashion has endorsed as "in",
or music played on instruments
made from trees and fellow beings.

Words may also be arranged
in pleasing patterns that remain
long after the anguish
that engendered them
is laid to rest; like flowers cut
and then displayed to grace
the human habitat, these lines
record the presence of a pain
that could not be assuaged,
the ghost of an excruciating ache
that would not be erased.

Every day commemorates
the trauma that has gone before:
litanies of self-destruction,
chronicles of loss, waste, war…


26.12.04

In Memoriam: good faith, which every
split second, somewhere on Earth, is
being abused, betrayed, extinguished.