Two Poems
Janet Kenny
Mutilés de guerre
Regard my child, the human race
cut off its nose to spite its face.
It mutilates itself to win
most angels standing on a pin.
A hollow victory that ends
the principles that it defends.
The money wasted on defence
deprives the world of common sense.
Great cities fall to loud applause
as people die in stupid wars.
No pyrrhic victory is worth
the price of everything on earth.
- - -
Evanescence
Each house I loved has disappeared,
each tree I climbed was felled.
Each shady woodland has been cleared.
Each memory expelled.
No use returning to a scene
that isn’t anywhere.
A vacuum mocking what has been.
My ‘now’ was never there.
The lying landscapes of the past
are meaningless to new
adventurers who move so fast
they redesign the view.
I know we knew another land
and saw a different sea.
What ‘was’ is not what ‘is’, the sand
shifts shape, and all is free.
There’s nothing permanent in art
except the burning drive
that activates a human heart
to prove it was alive.
- - -
Janet Kenny left New Zealand to pursue a career as an operatic and concert singer in London, then settled in Sydney, Australia, where she worked in the anti-nuclear movement and jointly compiled, wrote and edited a book about the nuclear industry, Beyond Chernobyl, published by Envirobook in 1993. Her poems have been published in many printed and online journals. She has published two collections of poems: This Way to the Exit (White Violet Press) and Whistling in the Dark (Kelsay Books). Her work is in several anthologies including Outer Space: 100 Poems, edited by Midge Goldberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This last particularly delights her because she is number 79 in the list of 100 poets who in recorded time have written in some way about space, including Homer, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley, Pushkin, Housman, Yeats, Lorca, Wilbur, Stallings and Simic. She is very sorry she can’t tell her late husband. He would have laughed.
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