Peter Lilly: Poems

The country I now call home is bleeding a senseless and panicked red, diluting its pain in the silence of normal morning routines. I still make my love the coffee I promised before we'd risen and seen the news, before we'd thought of the inevitability of children at fireworks, and how this the attacker knew. She looks so beautiful,  eyes heavy and glistening with unspilt tears.  Neither of us knowing how to use words,  how to understand the reality of atrocity.  Beyond the consolations of world leaders,  beyond social media reactions,  beyond the spin this will be used for,  beyond the excuses and explanations,   beyond the claims of responsibility and repeating backlash,  beyond the reports and crafted articles,  beyond the frames of the chosen photographs.  The truth is shards of lacerating glass.  It is a blood-stained truck and pieces of people.  It is a child's excitement dashed ...

Pictures of something achieved lose their reality when you touch the flat surface and realise it is only an imitation of three dimensions. I would try to chisel a sculpture but I've never had the time required to select the type of rock. So it's paper cuts instead of crushed bones, and crocodile tears instead of wailing. It's waking up instead of being born.   I couldn't grasp the intention of the new medium. I got lost analysing the brush strokes, and a world of feeling breathed and pulsated around my lifeless sums. Written in the summer of 2015.  This poem is about beauty's fragility to dissection, an observer's susceptibility to pride, and the imagination's vulnerability to desensitisation.  Sometimes we must  consciously humble ourselves before beauty, whether it be man-made art, that of nature, or the beauty within the divine, so that we do not remain unaffected. Emotional responses ...