Poem and collages by La Sirena featuring in the fifth issue of Surrealerpool’s magazine, ’Patastrophe! (27 May 2022).
https://surrealerpool.home.blog/patastrophe-no-5/
https://surrealerpoolhome.files.wordpress.com/2022/08/patastrophe5-online.pdf
‘How Much Longer?’
The torn map reveals the ghosts of the city
Dreams of protesting with the Russian pacifists
Pleased with war’s dreadful and tumultuous roar
The locomotive has taken them nowhere
Roll the dice and take your turn
The sunflower smiles through the blood of the rubble to greet the new day
He who cannot play chess only uses brutality
Butterfly children slaughtered by noblemen in the city
Sugar the petrol, sell your guns and hide
The children roar in wild tears until they cry themselves to sleep
Ghosts should rise up to drag the warmonger to hell!
The desert queen serves the mad king
The mad king is distended
Avenging strife embitters human life
What is invisible will light up the sky in incandescent colours
The doll child hides in East Budleigh
Ivan Bilibin and Pushkin should curse the mad king to hell
A chorus of war cries from behind keyboards far from harm
The alchemy of dreaming heals the broken hearts
Screams and curses across myriad media apps
Karkhiv can never sleep, can only dream of peace, can only endure in the hearts and minds of those who will carry hope to the highest mountains for all to see
A half-hearted re-enactment of old mistakes, but with real deaths
Extra points for the grim reaper for taking the mad king
Workers and refugees captured and tortured in a celluloid prison
The young woman took her revolver to bed and was prepared to use it
Inferno awaits the mad king
The boys in the field are bored, or afraid or just excited by the game
My son is missing an eye and my mother’s wing has been ripped
Dante should pull him down there
Inevitable as a pub brawl at closing time, last orders called
The imaginary letter, Z, doesn’t exist in Russian. Neither should the mad king
The inferno takes them all to his heart until they march to the beat of the war drums, the death drums, the holocaust drums
No one is leaving until we find out who really started it
Every embrace is a sign of hope, of defiance
Where are the angels now?
The wind blows the shards of the silent mirrors across their broken faces and captures their death throes for all to see
A world left blind and toothless by the law of revenge
We suffocated on steam that turned into locks of human hair
The mad king of antiquity belongs in the past, not now
We run and burn and fall and run over and over again
And midnight trembled to see such terrors
The fighting leaves old men deformed in the streets
May Baba Yaga escort the mad king to hell
A stain upon another generation, damned to repeat the whims of their rabid masters
All of this just to reset the board for the next time
Blood stained the monochrome city of ashes
We, the invisible demand to be heard even if we cannot be seen
May the liar choke on his lies
She hung up the remnants of shame like a ventriloquist’s flag for all to see
Criminals jostle to steal the clothes and words of the famous dead
The mad king is fragile, just like a chess king. And like a chess king, I want to throw him to the ground
The war is fought by actors and actresses, not by women and children
Who pays the price?
We bleed
Spent
How much longer?
Collective poem by Doug Campbell, Taya King, Daina Kopp and Darren Thomas
La Sirena 