Poetry - Lynn White

  The Great Dictator He thinks he’s so fine resplendent well groomed perfectly dressed strutting and tupping to trump all their tricks. He’s an early riser and cocky as cluck his voice always loudest above all the rest his promises always fatter and juicier soon they’ll be kings of their castles, he says. Then he calls them to roost in the little shack that is their home.  His roost is grander. He rules it now and with his bone sharp spurs, he’ll defend it to their death. They’re all listening now, the powerful, the powerless obediently following his orders but one day all those fluffy chickens  will come home to push him off his perch. Then they’ll take him home. https://medusaskitchen.blogspot.com/2025/04/dream-garden.html

  Story Teller She’s lived a long time, even longer than her years. Every line is a poem of coloured beads, every wrinkle tells a story, her story,  her history, her life, her peoples story their lives,  their stories, the ones her mother told and her mother, the ones her father told and his father. Generation after generation still living with her in her stories. https://feversofthemind.com/2025/04/03/ekphrastic-challenge-8-poem-from-lynn-white/

  Graveyard I sit here quiet and gravely thoughtful. It feels so peaceful on the surface but I know gravity is on the pull, drawing the dead down below trying to keep them for itself in the graveyard. I don’t think graves want gravity I think they want to rise up,   taste the joy of lives already lived which live on still in memories, and be grave no longer refusing burial rejecting gravity remaining alive in the glimpses,   of lives passed,   brushing with immortality as they wait. Wait   for the worms   to devour them   and bring life back to the graveyard of memories   and dreams. https://poetsonline.org/archive/arch_cemetery.html

  Spaghetti Head Everything is in such a tangle it’s impossible to explore where the threads lead, impossible to work out these coloured threads of a life intertwined like spaghetti scrambled in my head. The outside is much simpler much more solid   more concrete building blocks of comprehension. But even so I can’t make sense of them can’t manage to put the shapes in order   and as soon as they enter my head they are shredded into looping noodles, beautiful hoops and tangles. And beauty seems more important than compressibility. Perhaps I’ll grow   to understand them in time those colourful threads of life intertwined round and round like spaghetti inside my head. https://masticadorestaiwan.wordpress.com/2025/04/04/spaghetti-head-by-lynn-white/

  Into The Silence Is the Pope a Catholic. It is said so, and a Humanist It would seem so. Or just a human speaking out into the silence speaking of   “cruelty not war”   in Gaza and of “genocide”   there in Gaza, speaking out in a small act of rebellion.   Is Joe Biden a Catholic. It is said so still. The unanswerable question is   why the Pope lets him be. Why   he doesn’t have a word in his ear direct, why   he doesn’t use his power to act where he can direct   action to excommunicate   the Catholic arming this cruelty blind to this genocide. Such a small act of rebellion speaking only   out into the silence. https://www.lulu.com/shop/j-chakravarti/genocidal/paperback/product-7k6dy4j.html?page=1&pageSize=4

  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/