Two Poems
Janet Kenny
The Law
The bright light of the moon paints white
on furtive creatures in the wheat
who scuttle frantic in full fright
to darker dens where tiny feet
can delve for shelter from the owls
who listen for the frightened beat
of wretched rodent’s muted prowl
not deep enough for safe retreat.
The softly feathered weapon finds
the throbbing heart and twinkling eye
that hopeless, yields itself resigned
to laws that doom the mouse to die.
With talons tight about the beast
the owl returns to where its chicks
anticipate the bloody feast
and love and cruelty must mix.
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Simple
We were of a different time
when light and landscape were enough
before a crueller paradigm
invaded with more alien stuff.
Hard city sounds and colder tasks
abused and twisted what we thought
until we chose to rip the masks
away before our minds were caught.
The simple things are never that.
Simplicity is out of reach,
elusive like a prowling cat
or moonlight on an empty beach.
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Janet’s notes: “My life oscillated between rural peace and rowdy cities. They were more alike than I expected.”
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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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