Ponderings about life, art & politics – Antonia Sara Zenkevitch

Festivals of Fire and Thaw

candles in earth tell
ancient fables to tree roots
angels whisper “Grow”.

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Dear Antisemite; a poem for Holocaust Memorial Day

The poem below is the first of a collection it has taken me a long time to share. I’ve not been sharing my work broadly for a while, both for health reasons and the sense of being silenced. Enough said on that one. This Holocaust Memorial Day I am sharing this. It is actually being…

Songs of Poppies Revisited

This Remembrance Sunday I am attaching links to two past posts of mine. On this day I recall all those who died or were injured in body or mind in wars they had no part in starting. I honour those who stood and fell against the forces of fascism from whatever country they hailed from. …

Poverty Lessons. — Denaya Rose

I learn to sleep on an air mattress in the one-bedroom apartment I share with my mother. We don’t have any real furniture yet, but we do have a space to call our own. There’s no overbearing or intoxicated male presence to tell us what to do, and for the first time in my life, […]…

Valcamonica; the last mountain (#WritePhoto)

August 2015 travelogue: Valcamonica, Italy The last mountain I climbed was a place I saw art that has spoken to our kin over millennia. It still offers a signpost to wonderers and wanderers today. I won’t kid around, the journey was hard; I could hardly walk, even then, plus my asthma wasn’t under control but…

The Meltdown

Dumbfounded, I watch this presidential meltdown – hardly the first – the Finnish president looks on as Trump, at his worst, alleges treason against his person; this ‘stable genius’ who coerced the leader of a besieged nation; withholding aid to trade with dirt on an opponent and his son; all this to pervert the next…

Priti

Priti Patel tells a nearly all-white, mostly male reactionary elite what she has been taught to say and think in order to be accepted. They look at her, confused, blank round faces staring back at this Asian woman reaffirming all their cherished prejudices. She speaks of ending the free movement of people once and…

Real Fantasy

(post formally called ‘the magic touch’) I love magical realism, the unexplained sitting side by side with routine, reasoned reality. Perhaps I love it because in truth reality rarely appears very reasonable. My fascination may in part be because that taste of magic fulfills in me a yearning for everyday enchantment, but not too much…