Gifts love-packed
Glass-balls gleam around
Plastic-bells compact
Move to and fro without sound
Amidst wreaths, and nutcrackers
Wool-stuffed Santa Claus
Waves his hands like backpackers
Gives a smiling solemn silent pose
Stockings and reindeers
Occupy their spaces as though it's their right
Snowmen on snowglobes with no fears
Mock at the Gnome that resembles a skeleton knight
Nativity Figures and Sets change the zeitgeist
Cardinals, finches, and redpolls rhythm-set
All cumulate their concentration on Christ
Has Emmanuel, in the hearts of humanity, been born yet…?
The enemy within
There has been a war up North but after some times
the occupying forces surrendered and took the train
back where they came from.
Newspapers and magazines were (for a while) free
of censors and horrific stories and pictures emerged
which the boy didn’t grasp and soon forgot.
75 years later, the boy, now an old man laid up in
a hospital ward gazing at a white wall remembered
the horrific photos he had seen.
Pictures of sexual deviations, torture and murder
not committed by the foreign occupier but by
opportunists who thrive in the shadow of wars
Sociopaths for whom other lives do not matter
to enrich themselves and indulge in obscene sex
that cumulate in strangling their unlucky victims.
Sociopathy is not an illness, is for them normal
as they are not humans and therefore lack humanity
love is for them, feelings of scant importance.
They, the sociopaths, are well-educated people
found in politics, the clerics, armed forces and
business, where they can exercise power over others
The war in Ukraine is a good example they are
pumping in weapons and refusing any peace negotiation
to the extent of risking a nuclear Armageddon.
as dark
clouds cumulate
sol goes into hiding
until betrayed by a silver
lining
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Contest: Cinquain Express Train
Sponsor: John Anderson
Placed 1st
© 30th May 2017
Gathering winds cumulate moisture seeds
rolling athwart tempestuous seas,
that float in gossamer clouds on
cooling breeze, easing savage
summer swelter parching
stark expectant fields.
Sweeping inward
monsoon black,
lightning
Flash!
crack!
Thunder,
splat! Heavy
drops, dance, dart, dash.
Joyful hands clap! Young
feet, jump, splish, splash; relief
floods. Torrents rain down warm on
earth’s upturned face, rivulets run
wild along nakedness, baptising
thirsty toiled fields made ready for planting.
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