Poetry

The harvest

/ Yvonne Aburrow / Leave a comment

The land should yield
Pomegranates, melons, olives,
Fragrant jasmine, dates,
Not smashed buildings, broken bodies,
A child’s body flung against a fence,
A grandfather holding his granddaughter 
Dead in his arms.

Bread should be shared 
Enough bread for everyone 
Dripping with olive oil and baba ghanoush 
Not withheld from starving people 
Dying for the lack of it.
Hungry, desperate people 
Giving their last bread to a child.

Eyes should see tenderness 
The kindness of the everyday 
Moments of joy, a child playing in the rain 
Not fleeing from bombs 
That have crushed everything 
They’ve ever known, killed their families 
crushed their hopes and dreams 

Poets, children, doctors,
Artists, writers, musicians 
All should be alive, sending tendrils of joy 
And hope twining through the walls,
Breaking down the fear and suspicion 
Not crushed, silenced, lost
Beneath the rubble of broken buildings.

Standing together, 
The two peoples might live in peace 
Seeing each other as human,
Sharing stories, baking and breaking
bread together,
All they want, all anyone wants 
Is for their children to play in peace,
To love and live and know joy.

Yvonne Aburrow
1 March 2024, 7:25 AM

Photo: Olive picking during Zaytoun’s tenth harvest in Palestine.
https://zaytoun.uk/about/

A man harvesting olives from an olive tree in Palestine. Behind the oiive tree are low hills and the white minaret of a mosque.

Mirror

/ Yvonne Aburrow

I wrote this poem and the note below it on 1 March 2003, in response to the Iraq War. Sometimes those of us opposed to that war were accused of having forgotten the dead of 9/11. Just like now when those of us opposed to the bombing of Gaza are accused of indifference to the dead of October 7th.

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Her eyes are flowers

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 2 Comments

Her eyes are flowers
That turn towards the sun
Her hair is tangling vines that run
Over your carefully manicured lawn
After the rain. She wakes at dawn
Hungry for the kiss of sunlight.

She is the shadows of leaves
The sound of roots pushing into the earth
She is the silent ancient mirth
Of ivy gnawing at buildings
Of the conquest of bindweed. She never
Yields an inch of ground.

She is the smell of wet earth,
Compost and leaf mould and worm-cast,
Her love may be slow but it is vast.
Her hour is always now and never past,
She will endure. She scatters her seeds
Over the whole earth, an endless dance.

Her speech is the pollen carried
From flower to blossom to flower
Whispering her vast design across the land.
Her songs and sighs are carried by the wind
Into your carefully sealed houses,
Into your dreams.

©️ Yvonne Aburrow
25 May 2023, 12:50 pm

Trans Day of Remembrance 2022

/ Yvonne Aburrow

So many brief candles,
So many deaths to mourn,
So many names upon our lips,
Each year a litany of names.

Their unique and perfect beauty
Crafted once by time and circumstance
Snuffed out too soon
Calling out for justice.

Write their names among the stars
Write their names on the wind
Etch the loss into the stones
Until the world changes.

Occult Clerihews Challenge

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 7 Comments

The Occult Clerihews Challenge! Write a Clerihew about a famous occultist (and post it in the comments or link back to this post so I get a ping-back).

The only rule of clerihews is that they have four lines with an AABB rhyme scheme, and the first line ends with the subject’s last name. I’ve bent the rule slightly because it’s hard to find words to rhyme with Gardner and Valiente. Clerihews don’t have to scan, nor be a complete biography of the person they’re about, and they’re comic rather than serious.

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“how come we were never taught this in our schools?”

/ Yvonne Aburrow

The oppressors never teach their children
About the oppressed, or their suffering.
Instead they claim that they brought technology,
Civilization, religion, as gifts
To the colonized, the marginalized,
The brutalized and the enslaved people.
You have to learn to look between the lines
At the imperfect feet of the statues,
And the nakedness of half-truths and lies.
Stolen land, stolen lives, streams of language
Dammed, diverted, stopped. Whole cultures broken
Into scattered fragments, gathering dust
In museums. Hiding between the cracks,
Waiting to emerge into the sunlight.

Yvonne Aburrow
9:22 am, 23 May 2022.

Inspired by the line “how come we were never taught this in our schools?” in WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier

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