Tuesday Poem

A Poem for the Innocents by Geoffrey Philp 

Tuesday Poem this week is by Jamaican poet Geoffrey Philp and posted by this week's editor Rethabile Masilo who lives in Paris.

The poem, on the NZ-based poetry blog, is called A Poem for the Innocents. About a father trying to reassure a child frightened by reports of war, it ends...

The map over his bed now frightens
him, and I cannot convince him,

despite the miles and miles of oceans

and deserts, that the machete
under his bed will not make him safer,
any more than the sacrifice of innocents
will save us, for he knows,
he knows, somewhere
between the Tigris and Euphrates,
a wave of steel races toward Babylon.

Rethabile, who comes from Lesotho, says in his commentary: My own experience as a kid is of politics at table and at school and in prayer. I have personally tried to write poems about that very experience, some of it violent. After reading and rereading A Poem For The Innocents, I found myself writing more poems about the same experience I'd had as a kid, on top of those I'd already written, using some of the same feelings, but getting fresh strength from Geoffrey's poem.

Spend a moment visiting Tuesday Poem where one good poem is just a start. Thirty poets worldwide are linked to the blog.

Tuesday Poem www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com