Wednesday, April 07, 2010

TILL THEIR FACES ARE OFF

Defacing and Mistake


I made a mistake ...
Think racial prejudice ...
I thought the headline read
"Eight Die in Korean riots" when
What it really said was "Koran Riots"
It was my mistake.

No. It was not North Koreans
Breaking out of prison. It was
No planned massacre by
Us Powers, or by a Brutal Regime.
No challenge to the status quo.
No real threat to our peace.

No News! It was just a bunch of
Christians...who got killed in Gorja,
Some blot in Pakistan, just a mistake.
They shot two, burnt the others
Till their faces were off, after someone
Spread rumours, true or false, about
A defaced Koran.

No, it was no racial prejudice.
No defaced Korean. It was
Just some Christians.



3 August 2009 © Wayne David Knoll
Parliament Plaza


A Tuesday in Australian
Melbourne,
In sunny early autumn,
it is lunchtime,
And today’s people gather
like scrutineers
Of grass at public statues,
many of them
Children, eating on their
retaining walls
A gallery in a governed street
parliament


As if the antipodes world’s-end
generations
had grown over the old enmities,
longing into
this Australian limpidity - as if
learnt from
its landscape - and fought into
the builtscape
Like any sunrise in a daily
renewal of vision
Lived for this, against all mongering
of peoples.


School children gather, native
fledglings in
The hen-shade of a great
Canary Island palm.
No security guard here but
restraining decency,
No men in camouflage, no Kalashnikov
to be seen,
no evidence of shade-wearing
watchers,
And the warm sky long since
a friend…


As long as the people are on
their guard.


© March 2010 - Wayne David Knoll