Poetry - Lynn White

  Burying the Hatchet Where better to bury the murder weapons than under the bodies in their graves. No one will know and there’ll be no hard feelings then. So that will be my strategy to bury hatchets under buried bodies so that all quarrelling will cease and everyone will live happily ever after, everyone still living, then.

  Immortality They tried them all, the amulets and potions of their time and place. Some worked for a time but death overcame them in the end   and proclaimed their ungodlike mortality. They were buried like treasure with their treasures   from this life readied for the next, living on only in memories which faded like funeral flowers. It was not enough. So portraits were painted   on the bindings of mummies or the wooden lids of coffins, stone effigies were carved   on tombstones, but only   for the rich and already godlike. It’s democratised now. Ceramic portraits carefully incorporated into gravestones, likenesses to be viewed   down the centuries, glimpses of a life passed, a brush with immortality.

  Art Installation Perfectly placed in its rosy red perfection, striking out against the dark backdrop and making an incongruous contrast to the less than perfect rusting white railings. Sitting there alone perfectly out of place not hanging from its tree or fallen from it not on the way to someone’s eager mouth not taking up the face space a la Magritte, his would have been a green apple anyway. As an exhibition piece in a gallery its reason would be clear an art installation rotting away in full purposeful view, perhaps a bite would be taken and that would make the news and so make the artist famous, but here in a street on a low wall in its place by design   or accident, we’ll never know. But it will change, disappear to be eaten stay to be nibbled by slugs or decay as part of nature’s plan. Just a moment in time captured there and then. https://publicreverie.com/three-poems-on-art-by-lynn-white/

  Art Exhibition The egg box was so sculptural, a mirror of life in textured paper, almost a work of art. And then I remembered the glasses left behind in a museum of modern art by error or intent, real glasses, not the “ne sont pas les lunettes” Magrittean sort, I could feel some guerrilla art hatching as I ate a white chocolate egg and resisted the other. I made my way to the Art Gallery and placed the egg box on a table, between the other exhibits and opened it to show the Magrittean egg inside. Just the one egg seemed most fitting especially since I’d eaten the rest. I had already written the title card. But such a work deserved two titles one above and one below the artist’s name, my name, of course. First came: “THIS IS NOT AN EGG” and underneath: “THIS IS NOT AN EXHIBIT” It was perfectly placed and looked magnificently subversively ironic. I think Magritte would be proud of my effort. And now I must wait to see if anyone notices. https://publicreverie.com/three-poems-on-art-...

  The Smile The picture fell. Unharmed she still smiled back. The glass had broken but uncut   she still smiled back. I replaced her back in the frame   that buckles precariously now, making her smile a little lop-sided, but then, so is the Mona Lisa’s. I think she likes the comparison as unabashed she still smiles back. https://chainmailpoetry.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-smile.html

Dear Juliet Listen to a father’s foreboding it’s a difficult time   when you’re half grown. No longer a child, but not yet an adult. Half grown with fully formed temptations, and such contempt for adults, fathers especially, you always know best but listen, the forbidden fruit of first love is poisonous   not for tasting and when the feuds of the fathers meet the dreams of the fathered there are no happy endings. You always knew best until you didn’t. So listen and heed a father’s foreboding. https://www.orenaugmountainpoetry.net/2026/06/dear-juliet.html