Featured Poetry

A Tender Ministry

White Malaki

I know my brother is gone.

Gone. But the machine

A clown, in receivership,

And it knows I weep

My sister, too.

it knows, still,

receiving clocks

because everything ends.

Mother, father, friends,

I live alone, smiling:

in lieu of memories,

Today, I rest, at its centre,

‘Take me’. And I listen

Of a stampede of elephants              

the centre of drear,

to the voices

come to knock the palace

praying to the Earth:

and I laugh, dreaming

down.

Yet I wish for immortality,

At my enemies,

I sat near centuries

Contrived in the centre of drear

to breathe nonsense

and to have no enemies

that were whole,

the dread architect.

to spit earaches

but time. Yet, I remember

each on fictional barstools,

And here, I sit, always

Reused, even on arrival,

Volcano, volcano, volcano,

under the same light,

as loudspeakers sound out

which later became:

one solitary bulb, worn-down

the popular litany prayer:

Volcano, volcano, volcano,

snare me, burn me,

I yearn for your unction of flame.

Yet drear, my home for years

A plastic pastiche, waiting

Spent searching platform 12,

taught more of volcano,

since birth, for departure.

and of the agony of choice.

it taught me of its weariness,

It taught me the agony of years

Yet I do not know,

So I fall backwards, again,

Volcano, volcano, volcano

how to end this,

unto drear,

snare me under tender light.

or how to end the agonies

and I am ashamed that I pray:

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