BROKEN GLASS.

Angst the gangster of my pain

Will I ever write again?

Of flowers in the field

Coloured blue as steel

Once annealed

By sunlight shining through the broken glass

Before the dearth of earth alas

Now cold,

As old as time, dying.

Birds still soar, trying.

Their songs now lost

Beneath the roar of memory

Lost to greed.

The need to feed our eyes

Takes second place

As industry races

Beneath a sky

Once full of hope

But now leaves us groping in the dark

With flashes of the past

Glimpsed through a landscape stark

And featureless

Inhabited by creatures

With no fire behind their eyes

The ones who believed the lie

The earth would never die

It was eternal

Now this earth’s infernal

With the billowing smoke of progress

Choking the lives of the hopeless

And the lost

The human cost?

Too much to mention

No time to pay attention

To the drones.

Got to keep the conveyors running

Simply clone some more, and cunning, 

Keep them poor and grateful.

In this hateful world of number ones.

Art and beauty all but gone

Buried deep beneath the rubble

Of the past

Beneath the bricks and broken glass

Of protest

Banners trodden

The ground now sodden

With the tears of those

Who remember the years

When the sun shone

On a green and pleasant land

Before hope was banned to memory

And I wrote of steel magnolias.

© By: - Pete Slater.    2013.