once, I would have scaled it, that guardian stone of hidden realms, mountain giants could just lift it, yet I’d be faster than most elves; with wolf’s heart and unbalanced feet, though many times I tripped and fell, I’d battle boundaries few could see; my barriers invisible, I’d climb after I tumbled, I carried on…
Tag: transcending pain
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…
Forgotten Eve
Hear this modern Eve,
where the apple slices sharp
the wax drowns new wicks
swallowing the knife of words
watch a candle cut to flame,
choaked, a blessing came
with an absence of honey;
uttered without tune
where weary throats broke quavers
on past moons, hope a sliver.
Antonia Sara Zenkevitch
The Bend
…life; potential; vitality,
such strength for the able-bodied,
I choose a bolder path you see,
or perhaps ‘choice’ was eroded
by kinks in my neurology
and the way my cells encoded
in ‘abnormal’ biology; …
You Are Not Alone
You are not alone, a cliché but true,
though it sounds like another platitude
beneath which judgement or indifference lies,
yet, when sincere, this phrase can catalyse
threads spun across oceans, footsteps on the moon …
Laughing the Stars
Laughing the Stars You laughed the stars Into the sky And, though clouds cover them In this moment of despair With those unquestioned whys In your bright eyes, I know your heaven’s there In the bright spheres of life, So, while we wait For the atmosphere to clear Let me just state For…
To Sweeten Bitter
Pain tasted bitter,
So, breath’s blades and sugar-canes
Spun honeyed braids of auric air.
Measuring Absence; a collaborative poem, join in.
Measuring Absence How do you measure the weight of absence; the void at the gate, in ambit, to wait to become an interval or sequence, a hitch in the air to anticipate, to calculate the mass of an absence …. (What comes next? Can you fill the absence of following verses?) I have recently…
To Speak
I have learnt to speak;
I have learnt to speak in silence when my voice was gone,
in mimes, memes and gesticulations with one arm,
I have learnt to speak in rhythms when my limbs were
free,
I have learnt to speak within the forms my body allows me,
I learnt to speak again,
again,
again,
again,
….
if and when
my voice is gone
as voices one day do,
when they speak of all I’ve done
I hope they’ll say this too;
I learnt to speak.
To All I was Before (poem)
I often speak of all I was before, Those ghosts carried ever in my casement, Echoing, like the voices of the wars I traversed, yet now I feel displacement, Life in pause, forbidden summits, woods, shores, Shops, parties, pavements, Vanished continents, consonants, confidence, The family, colleagues; friends I see no more; Those ghosts carried…
Antonia Sara Zenkevitch 