Poetry - Lynn White

  Knowledge And Power If only we’d known, they said when the inmates of Belsen   were first seen in their deliberately ill-fitting  striped pyjamas dying from starvation, dying from torture dying from cold, dying from illness, dying dying dying. If only we’d known, they said  when the extermination camps were discovered, the gas chambers, the slave labour camps where inmates were  killed by over-work, killed  by malnutrition killed by disease. Exterminated. If only we had known, they said, there would have been no appeasement, no ‘peace in our time’ self-protection, no treaties for self-preservation,  no deals done in self-defence. With the knowledge  intervention would have happened genocide been prevented if only we’d known. Well this time we knew. This time we knew from the beginning. This time we knew from before the beginning, from long before the beginning about the intimidation,  the arbitrary arrests, homes demolished, the camps ...

  Strange People Perhaps it’s not so strange to focus on the minutiae of life everyone needs self defence after all. And to take notice of catastrophes happening now would be worse than stormy weather and family squabbles so we must protect ourselves from such exposure. But not everyone has looked away in history, or in their own history. Some of them have had enough. Burn out happens, that’s not strange. But those Anti-Apartheid campaigners who unconditionally support the perpetrators of the genocide and apartheid being committed now. Those people are strange. Yes, such people are strange and strangers. https://www.lulu.com/shop/j-chakravarti/genocidal/paperback/product-7k6dy4j.html?page=1&pageSize=4

  My Father’s Son I never knew my father’s son. Even though I met him once, or maybe twice,   I never knew him. And then I met his son.   Caught him   miraculously in a net. Held on to him   tightly. And, I found that he hadn’t left early, my father’s son. He’d waited for me, wondering, for a long time. And so I found him, my father’s son. When he was   just ninety six, I found him. But I was too late to know him. At ninety five, he was already dead. So I never knew him, my father’s son. https://stortellerpoetryreview.blogspot.com/

  Breathless The pandemic is past but still we are being suffocated with pillows of power and prejudice, hardly hidden, in the institutions we were told would protect   us all. Some of us believed it. But the old masks are off now, forced off the face by lies. All they hid is exposed. We know it now. So in these new times we will put on our masks carefully to protect ourselves.   We know now that we are all   George Floyd potentially later or sooner. And we know we are all his killers potentially unless we look behind the masks. https://keepingtheflamealive.wordpress.com/ktfa-magazine/

  To Fill In The Blanks My face was blank an empty oval. I wanted to fill it in with eyes, nose, mouth and a smile, my smile. But I can’t it’s lost eroded out there in the blue with all those shapes torn blank featureless as life my life as I try to fill in the blanks. https://spinozablue.com/poetry-by-lynn-white/

  Evening Falls The sun shines through the broken window sunbeams shattered in broken glass. Outside the whole orange globe still shines for now. But when evening dawns, then it will fall and wait for the day to break. And still the glass will stay   broken. https://spinozablue.com/poetry-by-lynn-white/