Threat of Extinction

Words hanging from parched branches confused and betrayed Under a canopy of shadows in the recess of belittled thoughts A prison of speechlessness bereft of expression and meaning Letters motionless in disarray fighting lost battles lonely at heart Starved streams of consciousness as a willow weeps in the wind Seedless dispersion of illiterate drought at the edge of the tree Reason and feeling disunited under a regime of torturous silence Not even black ink on charcoal where fire should liberate passion A scrabble of incongruence submerged under ashes of emptiness What if there was no poetry and the writer was shackled and numb Dead inside an alphabet of syllables refused collaboration and script Naked to a helpless core of scorched earth void and festering agony A scribe in handcuffs and the hangman tightening a noose of contempt For the chorus of voices unable to shout from roof tops and watchtowers While a tongue tied writer awaits his sentence for the crime of free speech Drowned in his ink pot like a convicted witch at society’s illegitimate court Or frying at the stake of burnt books at a show trial of unlettered verdicts Misunderstood misspelt hung and quartered to the applause of division A ballade-monger sings his swan song before the apocalypse rules out The appeal to common sense for an elegist prepared for a final encore As the final curtain is stuffed in between lips and amphora of metaphors No one can say that they have not been forewarned of overt perpetration Were merely following orders to suppress revolutions of evident trespass That they deemed degenerate what disagreed with a deep currency of fear And yet if one rhyme survived a single epilog remained on a grave stone Just one cemetery of unmarked burial sites lived on etched into history Poetry could not be killed for freedom is much stronger than censure 20th January 2020